Steel Moonlight
by DemonRoseAlexiel
Summary: A side of the story has yet to be told. Based on the fanfiction, Blue Sky, by waffleguppies, a POV piece on the character Garret Rickey. Told from his point of view, this story will cover events both during and after Blue Sky ends. Can be viewed as a companion piece. WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS FOR BLUE SKY AND OC'S
1. The Prologue

_**The Prologue**_

 _ **Echoing the Words**_

A person opens their eyes to an all-encompassing void. It stretches as far as they can strain their eyes to see, their forehead straining to keep the focus on the distance in front of them. There are no walls or ceilings in this place, no discernible definitions. It's as if someone decided to take a giant eraser and meticulously tried to rub out all the stray marks and lines of a sketch they were none-too-pleased with.

The person wonders how long they have been there, just standing dumbly into empty space trying to sculpt some sense of what is going on. Come to think of it, they can't really seem to form any sort of coherent grasp on the situation at all. They don't remember who they are, how they got here, or any details about themselves. Hell, they can't even remember what they look like. It's all a jumbled mess, a fog on their mind that will not lift no matter how many times they do that squinting motion with their eyes. As if _that_ will help. But, for some reason, they don't do what a sane person would do and immediately panic. They get the odd sense that it doesn't matter at this point. They just stand there blankly, wondering what will happen ne-

A light suddenly catches on with absolutely no warning, blinding the poor guy and sending him backwards onto his bare behind. _Wait_ -oh, of course! He's a guy! _Wow_. How could he forget something as simple as his own gender? He mentally berates himself for dishonoring his own manhood. He's a well-bred man and he's damn proud of it! He's a man with a sore behind.

Surprisingly, the fall doesn't send him careening into an eternal fall in this seemingly endless vacuum and lands him in an awkward sitting position. His left leg ends up unpleasantly smashed underneath his well-muscled frame and his right leg comes up to wave hello to the entire empty universe. After settling himself more comfortably on the floor, he inspects his crushed leg for any major damage. The only implication he finds of his body's bizarre desire to twist in on itself is a splotchy parade of red marks on his tawny-white skin. Oh hey-another thing he remembers about himself! He's catching on quickly. Maybe, he's smarter than he took himself for at first.

 _Hello_ , a monotone, airy voice says that catches the abyssal traveler out of his self-discovery celebration and ego stroking. The man looks around puzzled and straightens his grizzled frame to prepare for the inevitable wincing climb to his feet. Balancing himself onto his good leg, he pushes his hands against the surreal floor that invisibly supports him. The light shines upon its surface, leaving sharp reflections of a glassy sheen, giving an appearance of looking through a window on a sunny morning. Glare spirals outwards from the circle of light on the glass floor, illuminating a white, oblong object.

The man slowly and curiously approaches the object, and becomes confused as to just what and odd thing he's seeing. The object in question is polished with an artificial shade of pure white. It stands upon three legs that support its egg-like frame, black and curved in the fashion of prosthetics that absorb impact with the ground. Lines are etched into its surface and the man surmises that the object is broken into several pieces, almost as if it had been put together from several parts. Like a machine, almost. A single, flaring lens stares at him with a laser pointing directly at his lower section, inspecting him with unflinching focus.

"Uh.., hello?" He asks this question with a sense of awkward caution, not sure if the thing in front of him is what is actually calling out to him. "Can-can I help you?"

The oblong thing startles him by moving its laser up to meet his gaze and opens the parts on its sides. They separate from its main body, panels attached to the mess of wires and steel beneath. Its circuitry becomes slightly exposed as it widens its lens.

 _There is another side to tell._

"Another what?"

 _A story yet untold, a voice yet unheard, a mind yet unseen._

"Listen, you're not making any sense, and I just need some help figuring out wherever the heck I am. Actually, first and foremost who I am. Do you know me? Do you know anything about me?"

 _The story has yet to be written. The pages are blank, waiting for the words to be marked in their pages. Yet the cards know the story. They hold the future. The lines of the future have been written, but the voice still lingers._

"Now, that makes no sense. How can the future be both written and unwritten? That's a paradox. Look, can you just stop with the fortune cookie speak so I can get some semblance of sanity. I'm already hard pressed at the edge of my dang head all this space-voidy dimension stuff. Just answer in a normal way, like a normal person. Well, you're not exactly normal or a person, but still, please just tell me what the absolute _heck_ is going on."

The fortune-teller forms a shape with its laser, a woman in determined flight.

"Okay, I will admit, that is pretty cool. How are you able to do that with just a circular panel in your optical processor? That should be impossible by the looks of you. You're like a robot of some sort right? Who built you? And for what purpose? Will you get me a look at your insides so I can see?"

The man is caught off-guard by just how many questions he is asking the tiny, white robot. "Wait, since when do I care about all this?! Look, just tell who I am and how I can get out of here. Okay, little thing?"

 _Strength is shadowed by memory. She seeks release and sanctuary from the terrors of the night. However, the Memory will not let her go. She is both free and shackled. She has prevailed where others have fallen, and will prevail again. But not without sacrifice._

Realizing that he is not going to get any straight answers out of it, the man decides to go along with the fortune reading and try to piece together what it is trying to tell him.

"Strength? Like a tarot card? You said something about the future. Who is 'she'? I assume it's the woman you're making with your little heat-seeking laser there. What sacrifice are you talking about?"

 _Strength will be close. She is chased by the Empress, merciless and cold. The Empress needs her. Strength alone, will not be enough._

At this point, the confused traveler decides to allow the strange contraption to go on its reverie and listens on in silence. He pieces together the story as it is being told and opts to ask questions only when necessary.

The robot shifts its image to that of a circular eye.

 _The Fool. He drifts aimlessly in a void, waiting for salvation and forgiveness. He sought knowledge, but could not handle the cost. The Fool is himself his greatest enemy. The good is the bad. The bad is the good. The truth will be too much._

The next part struck the man in the chest like a newly sharpened serrated knife.

 _He will need you._

"Me?! What can I do? How can I help when you don't tell me anything but cryptic mumbo-jumbo and vague statements?!" The man shouts in exasperation as he strokes his bushy, impressive beard. A _very_ impressive beard! Like, one of those beards that will guarantee a trophy at the World's Manliest Facial Hair Contest.

The robot next aims its laser at the man's forehead, startling him and setting giving the motor of his mind the mental kick to get it started and focused again. He listened intently to what it next said.

 _The Magician builds his walls. He rips the ground and forces it skyward. He shapes words into a Siren, a High Priestess. She will sing to all the world. He clings to beams of moonlight and the ringing of bells. The Magician shall bring joy to all._

 _It will not be enough._

"Wait, if I'm supposed to make everyone happy, then why is that a bad thing?"

 _Pygmalion sculpted Galatea out of stone, a woman that was flawless in all ways. He doted on her with endless love and passion. Aphrodite took pity on him and brought his creation to life._

"Okay, seriously…what does Greek mythology have to do with the future? Now, I think you're just messing with me."

 _Maybe, I should just leave._

"Fine by me, it's not like you anything useful to say in the first place. Blasted thing can't even answer a sensible question. Must be defective. Well, nice chat with you little thing," the annoyed amnesiac muttered sarcastically.

At this point, the man was just simply annoyed at his whole predicament. He was beginning to just give up and start wandering in any given direction when he noticed it. Not really a feeling, but more a sensation. A sensation of lifting and awareness. His mind became clearer as the sensation took over. He began remembering himself in the vaguest parts of the abyss of his mind. The dark void began to shatter and crack as white, glaring light swallowed everything in its voracious appetite.

 _Don't give up on her._

"Wait wha-"

 _That's all I can say. Goodbye._


	2. The Meteor

_**Chapter 1-The Meteor**_

 _ **Blazing in the Sky**_

Garret bolted upright and smacked his head on the metal workbench above him.

" _OW_! Shi- wait, what W _hh_ heeere am I? W _hhhhy_ can't I see a b _laaaa_ shted thing?"

His words were groggy and came out slurred from his mouth like molasses that dripped onto the dusty floor. Some of his facial muscles had still not gotten the memo that _the human was awake_ and left his visage half drooping and melting away along with his speech. It was also the reason for why the poor man was half-blind and dazed while staring blankly at the floor.

Loose bits of metal shavings and misshapen screws were scattered about as he attempted to drag himself into a less uncomfortable sitting position in order to get his bearings. Unfortunately, his left leg had been under all two-hundred-fifteen pounds of him, and its email had not been working for some time now, so the muscles in it had thought they had gotten lucky and called in a sick day. As a result, Garret's brain was not receiving any feeling from this particular leg, not to mention any movement. The leg therefore, had to go through the awkward and slightly painful phases of having blood return to it and get the nerves working again.

That suited Garret just fine because he wasn't in any hurry to smack his head against the flat, cold iron a second time. He also tended to wake up slowly naturally, like a steam train running its engine up to the correct temperature for water to boil before lurching, and finally, rolling deliberately forward. However, when Garret's engine _was_ running awake, it tended to keep him rolling for hours without any need for rest or relaxation. Where most men were staggering to catch their breath while clutching their sides in stitching pain, he would be running backwards yelling words of taunting encouragement. This often resulted in him hearing the faint sound of voices cursing his name. But, he didn't care. If they needed a breather, then he would see them at the finish line. He had places to go and things to do.

What ran even faster than his body was his _mind_. His mind buzzed with activity as it attempted in vain to get his leg to cooperate with it. He was currently in the pins-and-needles-so-sensitive-you-can't-even-put-weight-on-it stage of returning feeling. The nerves in his brain were angrily yelling at his lazy leg muscles to quit slacking on the job. They knew the muscles weren't sick and if they didn't get themselves back to work they were as good as _**fired**_.

 _Wasn't there somewhere I was just now? There was this place and I can't seem to picture it in my mind,_ Garret thought to himself very carefully. His mind seemed to be urgently reminding him of something important, but all he came up with was a blank slate of confusion.

Maybe he had dreamed something? Garret didn't tend to dream unless it was something of importance. He knew that all dreams were really just a representative slideshow of what the brain had experienced. Although, what the brain showed through the mind tended to vary. It could have been a repeat of an event that happened a week ago, or a scene from a movie he had watched, or even just an abstract universe with different laws that defied all physics with the central purpose of reflecting his inner emotions and deeper psyche.

 **Nerd translation:** It could have just been because he was _slightly_ ticked off at Aaron for having used his toolbox without asking and thrown all his tools in the wrong drawers. _**Again.**_

Whatever he had dreamed, he didn't dwell too long on it and focused on finally bringing himself to his feet. Perhaps the prospect of losing their jobs had gotten his muscles to finally cooperate and support his climb upwards-

 _-_ and straight into the radio dish he had been fiddling with all last night.

" _OUCH! Son of a-_ seriously?! I can't walk _two feet_ without risking my brains being pounded to mush and melting out of my ears!" Garret exclaimed out his pain while rubbing the back of his head, pushing around his disheveled blonde hair as he felt a spreading bruise with his hand.

"Mornin', Sleeping Beauty. How was the floor last night?" said a deep, baritone voice that echoed its tones throughout the stockroom. "Bet it was nice and comfortable taking a snooze with the roaches."

"Yeah, first class, nice bedding too! Nothing beats stone hard slate to rest your head against," Garret replied, annoyed that the first person to find him conked out beneath his worktable was Aaron Halifax.

His back cracked, audibly and physically, in protest against having laid on said floor for some time. He turned his head to face the elder man, who was currently leaning against a dilapidated tractor that was unceremoniously decorated with spare tires and parts. One of Aaron's arms was casually rested on top of the seat, the brown leather eaten through by moths and hazardous mixtures of chemicals. It looked like an inside out block of Swiss cheese that someone had left out in the sun too long.

Aaron, who had been hauling lumber into his shop yesterday, also had the half-burnt look of baking in the summer's rays. His massive arms were tinged a reddish-brown, as if they had been recently removed from a potter's brick oven with the smell of earth and heat. The dirt had been lovingly packed into his leathery skin, the canyons of wrinkles etched deep into his frame by time and effort. Fifty long years of effort. On most men, these signs of age were seen as a curse. But to Aaron, they were the river's long trails, giving him the strength and wisdom as ancient as the Earth it carved beneath his feet.

He kindly shared some of that wisdom to Garret, "Ya know, one of these days you're gonna end up giving yourself more than a couple of wallops to the head. Might I remind you of that time you passed out on the Larringtons' roof. You were lucky you only broke a couple of your fingers on the gutter instead of ending up bound to a wheelchair the rest of your life."

"Oh, come off it. That was one time and I had been trying to fix their radiator in eight-degrees Fahrenheit for six hours."

"Maybe you shouldn't have taken so long then?"

"The reactor coils got stuck to each other and I was literally freezing my ass off!"

"Heh-that woulda been convenient. Could've used it to preserve all the meat instead of havin' to wrestle with the coolant system to keep the ice from melting. Speaking of which, it's gone down again."

"All right, old man. Just because you own the building I live in doesn't mean you get to use my body parts as you please."

"I also own the place where you sleep, where you should be-ya know- _sleeping_. Just because _you_ have this grandiose project doesn't mean you get to slack off _here_." Aaron reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out a worn-out blue rag. "Before you do, though, wipe off the floor. You drooled all over it."

After being tossed the rag, Garret looked down in annoyed disgust and slight embarrassment to see a dark, watery stain plastered on his overalls. It seems his words were not the only things dripping onto the floor.

Great.

[-]

The stairs creaked as Garret shuffled his way up.

His bedroom was in the attic of the place he worked, Eaden General, a three-story shop that dealt in pretty much anything the residents of the town (conveniently, also named Eaden) needed. Clothes, fishing wire, bug spray, groceries, light bulbs, and other assorted miscellaneous goods. Most of it came from Aaron's dealings with other residents and shipments that came in every two weeks from Depot, the nearest town. And by nearest, it meant an overnight drive in open, boundless Michigan country. Over fifty miles away.

With that fact in mind, it wasn't hard to imagine that Aaron was an extremely busy entrepreneur. His hours often varied with how much activity the town was seeing. Not that one hundred and fourteen people made that much activity in the first place. But still, Aaron liked to see that the people he saw everyday were well-fed, taken care of, and staying out of trouble.

Garret knew that Aaron, despite his constant jabs and "sagely advice", truly did care about him. Their daily jousting contest of sarcastic comments about each other's misery was just their routine. Mostly, it was Garret storming off with his shoulders hunched while the old man was giving his back that slow, knowing smile of his. You know, the one where he's slightly amused and annoyingly victorious because he had just _won_ the argument.

It was with one of those smiles that Garret had just left the stockroom with. It was just another day. Just another morning. Just another start.

Garret spent most of his days working under Aaron as his employee. Restocking shelves, running the cash register, cleaning the fish tank (he was not particularly fond of that one), and just keeping the massive building in a reasonable sense of order.

He also happened to have a very innate talent and passion for anything involving machinery. That meant that he also spent his days going around Eaden working as a handyman. Anything from cars, electrical systems, computer software, parts scavenged from ruin sites, tiny microchips. Basically, anything that involved metal, silicon, and programming, he could fix. And dismantle. And reassemble. And repurpose. And modify beyond anything that was included in the original design, within reason. And sometimes without.

It was his current project that had had him up all night trying to readjust the wavelength-size parameters of a radio dish.

 **Foxglove**.

At least, that's what he called her. Most of Eaden called her "that-dang-huge-radio-tower-that's-supposed-to-get-us-better-reception."

He had been working on her for the last three years now, spending countless hours threading together seemingly random pieces of hardware found in the stockroom. Most of them had been lying around the place for decades because they had been simply forgotten. Garret figured that if they were just laying around taking up space, then he should do his best to at least have them laying somewhere where they could actually be of some use.

So, this is how he spent most of his free hours. He had cut, welded, adjusted, bored, sautered, melted, and just plain beaten the pieces until they shifted and settled in together. It was if he was taking the broken, twisted jungle of metalwork and forcing it skyward until it scraped the very atmosphere. That way, when he finally got her working, she would broadcast from one endless plain of honeyed wheat to the other. A mosaic of rusty metal, binary, electrified frayed wires, fiber glass, protocols, blood, and sweat. Many would assume she was a modern-day recreation of the Tower of Babel. However, instead in it resulting in the divine severance of humanity with separation of languages, she would instead merge the broken pieces by providing the bridges of communication.

Eaden did not specifically know when "it" had become "she". Garret had initially thrown himself headfirst off the boat christened _Great Sanity_ with just as much unadulterated gusto as his other previous works. However, in the ensuing drowning spell he had put himself through just trying to get her to stand up straight, Garret had developed an all-consuming passion for Foxglove. Just the act of giving the tower a name had caught some people off guard. Some thought it was cute, like he was giving a name to a pet he had rescued off the street. Others had less kind things to say, usually involving the words "no" and "life".

He honestly didn't care.

Was it wrong to say he had now arrived to the point of _obsession_? Perhaps. However, Garret didn't like to use just one word to describe how he felt about his creation. He was… _proud_. _Amazed._ _Thankful_. _Miserable_ (only because she kept him working so late). _Astonished_. You just couldn't sum her up in one word, just as a man cannot sum up in one word why he loves a woman. To do that would belittle her, and Foxglove deserved more. Garret had caressed her, held onto her, and he knew her better than anyone. It was almost as if he subconsciously was trying to transfer his own pulse into her, giving her life, watching her thrive, and hearing her sing.

Nothing in the world would had made him happier.

Well, successfully finding his PDA was currently becoming a close second.

That was what he had started doing the moment he entered his room. Actually, his room looked more like a colossal junkyard that had been maliciously assaulted by a Category Five Hurricane, followed by a private army testing their latest automated warheads.

At first glance, any normal person would say that Garret had long ago abandoned any resemblance of what they might call a decent living space. Any small pieces of interesting machinery that weren't too big were laying in scattered heaps all over. That included the small crawlspace that served as his closet and the creaky spring mattress that served as his bed. Clothes hung from the bars that supported the roof of the building, most of them blackened with motor oil and frayed at the seams from overuse. Shelves filled with technical manuals were crammed in the back corner next to a small, dusty window. Their insides burst with papers, so they hurled their contents helter-skelter onto the floor. It looked like an especially horrendous crime scene, where the books had been stabbed multiple times with a very sharp, very deadly knife.

A work desk sat under the circular window, dimly lit by the first rays of the early morning. It served as an examination table for Garret's autopsies of broken machinery. He used it to find out their functions when they were alive, how they had died, and what use they could be put to, if any. Dozens of sketches were sprawled across its wooden surface. Most were in a scattered mess, depending on whether Garret was currently studying them or if he was saving them for a rainy day.

At first glance, Mr. Rickey's personal workspace was a disorganized mess. Yet, Garret never seemed to lose anything for long. Upon closer detail, someone could observe that _he_ knew where everything was. Every one of his sketches were relatively in close proximity to one another. The lines that were drawn on them had been depicted with striking precision. This precision could only have come from someone with a discerning eye for detail. So yes, there was indeed a nausea-inducing, crooked, and crude method to his madness. Garret understood it, and that's what mattered.

Garret finally found his PDA uncomfortably sandwiched between a handbrake and an old pre-Combine book full of guitar tabs for rock songs. Its orange lettering left a dim afterglow on his face as he picked it up and read it:

TASK LIST

 **TO-DO**

TAKE STOCK OF FOOD ITEMS

FEED FISH

DUST COUNTER

SWEEP FLOOR

RESTOCK SHELVES

FIX MRS. KENT'S PLUMBING ISSUE

 **FOXGLOVE**

RECONFIGURE SATELLITE DISH 25 BROADCAST PARAMETERS

FUSE 10MM WIRES CONNECTED TO PRIMARY DIGITAL ROUTER

INITIATE BOOT UP SEQUENCE TRIAL #427

DEBUG SECONDARY DIGITAL PROCESSING UNITS

CALCULATE AND REPOSITION DISHES 4, 13, 17, AND 22

 **PERSONAL**

SLEEP

This task list was his lifesaver.

Although Garret could always make sense out of his own mess, he had trouble keeping everyone else's mess straight with his own. Headlines detailing which category which particular task fell into were bolded with blocky text. Work tasks he did for Aaron or maintenance jobs he was currently employed for fell under "Daily" and were put first to remind him of their importance, despite their mundanity. The work he did on Foxglove used to fall under his "Personal" category, but Garret eventually had to separate his passion from his biological needs.

He always carried his PDA wherever he went. Not only did it keep his daily routine in check, it also was portable. Portability was essential when working on a project that was over twenty feet high, had wires hanging loosely off of it, and was just generally a constant falling hazard.

There was a reason Garret had the muscled arms of a silverback gorilla.

It wasn't the fanciest piece of technology, but it did its job and was durable. _Very_ durable. Durable enough to stand up to getting caught in a generator, run over by a truck, dropped off a radio tower when Garret was busy welding something, and being mistaken for a chew toy by the Hatfields' dog.

Duke tended to bite shiny thing first and bark questions later, usually when said shiny thing was ripped to indiscernible pieces.

With vital lifeline in hand, Garret entered a small alcove to the back of the attic.

This alcove was painted a shade of white that wasn't quite white, but more of a demurred cream. It was painted that way in order to differentiate bedroom/warhead dump site from bathroom. Compared to the rest of the attic, it was plain and uncluttered. A sink and toilet sat against the wall; bare pipes came out of holes in the walls and floor, snaking their way around each other.

A lone mirror was situated above the sink, slightly dusty from the lack of air flow up under the roof. Small cracks could be seen in the corner from where Garret had accidentally shoved into it too many times when he woke up late. There was a small trimmer lying next to the faucet, which Garret picked up when he came to it.

He didn't use a razor because he was too proud of his beard. Never saw the need to completely shave it off. It was like a shimmering, sunlit medal which boasted to the world of Garret's manliness. He had been working on growing it since he was fifteen. Aaron had laughed at his attempts at growing facial hair. However, unlike most people, who are gradually introduced to the dreaded process of puberty, Garret had been hit by a truckload full of it because the driver realized his delivery was due Tuesday and not Thursday. Now, he had to tame the wild beast growing from his face every three days in order to at least look presentable.

He groggily stared at his reflection in the mirror; his eyes ringed by the dark lines of exhaustion. Their shade of blue was a cloudy, misty one, like steam rising from a boiler. His hair, usually a sunlit gold, was now darkened by sunspots of grime. He inwardly groaned as he set to work grooming his mane.

As he trimmed his beard, he absentmindedly glanced down at a yellow piece of paper taped on to the top left corner of the mirror. On it was a short note written in smooth, practiced word that was easily legible:

 _Don't forget to take care of yourself. Alright?_

 _-Chell_

The subject of the note smiled slightly. Chell had given him that note a couple of weeks ago when she had noticed him trying to put socks in the freezer in the shop. She always seemed to notice little things that other people might not pay attention to. For example, she could always tell when Garret was getting a little _too_ involved in Foxglove. She never outright told him to stop working on her, but she would sometimes give him reminders like this. It was part of the reason they had become such close friends. Chell just sort of volunteered herself to make sure he wasn't doing anything to endanger his health. Over the four years he had known her, she had become something of an adoptive older sister.

She also always helped him out on Foxglove. He was always grateful for the help, and she seemed to genuinely like spending time with him.

 _I'll have to find some way to thank her someday_ , Garret thought as he finished cleaning up all the trimmings from the sink. _Maybe, I'll take her out on a trip. Maybe to Lake Michigan? It is a two-day drive, but I'm sure we could stay a couple of weeks._

As he mused upon this subject, the now less grimy man began gathering all the schematics he would need for that afternoon.

 _We could bring the rifles and actually shoot a_ _ **real**_ _target. I've heard there's some hunting grounds not too far from there. Just set ourselves up a nice little camp and shoot deer. I could read up on some hunting books and make some traps and lures._

 _Oh!-I wonder if she wouldn't mind wearing camo. I've always wanted to wear camo. Test to see if the stereotype about it actually working is up to snuff. Although we probably would have to adjust the fabric design to reflect the natural plant life. I_ _ **could**_ _also adjust the insides with porous lining so we don't die sweating our butts off._

He continued this metaphorical hunting trip in his mind, buzzing with all the possibilities of survival gear so that he could enhance the trip. Garret was actually beginning to seriously consider taking Chell on this lake trip, and he felt electrified as he hurried down the creaky stairs. His engine had finally started, and he was ready to meet the morning headfirst.

[-]

The actual store part of Eaden General was situated on the first floor, with the stockroom in an extension to the back. It was through here that Garret briskly walked through, skillfully maneuvering around the shelves and stacked piles of merchandise.

The first impression of the store was very homely. The floor made of sturdy oak wood, giving the room a rich, earthbound surface. Aisles were filled with all assortments of produce, cans, bottles, packages, and spools. Signs were dramatically competing each other for attention; some new and printed cleanly, others with the characteristic mark of a human's unique penmanship.

A freezer that usually provided a background droning noise was placed next to the counter, but it was currently going on strike against its employer for unsuitable work conditions. The summer heat made it work overtime, and it was not going to do anything until its needs were satisfied. If Garret didn't meet its demands soon, then all of the meats stored within would eventually rot out. Meat tended to give off the smell of thousands of skunks deciding to die all at once at this temperature, and Aaron would never forgive him if that happened.

The coolant system was located outside of the building so that its noise was muffled by the brick walls. Garret pushed his way through an unlocked, windowed door, a string of bells tinkling behind him.

The air was clear and mild. The sky was a deep blue slightly tinged with gold. It was just early morning, the sun only barely reaching out its rays onto the landscape. Crickets were still playing their natural songs to each other- _skreep skreep_ -their tones gradually softening. The stars dimly shone against the backdrop of the sky, leaving ghostly imprints of their presence before melting away into the rising sun's rays. Some birds came to take their turn in the morning orchestra, greeting the sun in their usual fashion:

 _-tweet tweet tweet-_

 _-Burreep-_

 _-Cheer-ee! Cheer-ee!-_

 _ **-RAWWWWWWWWWK-**_

The crow came in a bit out of key. This, however, seemed to tip off the other birds that it was alright to start screaming their little lungs out. They flew off in pairs, swirling and swooping around each other for first dibs at breakfast. Hey, it was a dog-eat-dog world. Or, in this case, a bird-eat-worm world.

Garret noticed that he had only slept for about four hours, judging by the low position of the sun. He remembered vaguely that it had been pretty dark when he had last checked outside. Technically, he had failed his daily task of getting enough sleep, but he didn't tend to need much sleep anyway. Especially the kind of comatose state he was in under that workbench.

He worked his way around to the coolant box, a grey container with vents in the sides and top. Usually, the vents would be blowing heated excess air, but all it was doing now was sputtering and whispering its protest.

 _Alright. Let's see if we can get this box talking,_ Garret thought as he pried open the front panel of the box with a steel rod and reached for the wrench in the pocket of his newly-put-on jeans.

As he set to work, the sun gradually reached its rays out until they stroked the sky with open fingers of orange. The sky beneath them was flushed into a striking vermillion, the brightness reaching outward into the horizon. The stars were just memories now, receding in the basking seraph that was the sun. The sky brightened in its presence, as if happy to see a long departed angel return to rescue it from its despair. A canvas of primary of fiery passion and awakening, only enjoyed in Eaden during the summer months.

The birds had strangely gone silent at this display, as if in awe of the majesty of the moment.

Garret wiped his brow with the bottom of his green-checkered shirt, practically absorbing all of the fiery fingers that stroked his back. After thirty minutes, he had finally deduced that the coolant system would not resume its duties unless one of its air flow tubes was replaced. He took out his PDA from on top of the box and made a note under DAILYto go search the cavernous storeroom for the part.

He looked up and observed that the birds were flying overhead. Usually, they would be black and brown blurs that twirled around each other lazily. However, this time they were all clumped together as one mass heading together in the same place.

 _That's odd. Usually those birds are fighting each other over scraps. Now, they're flying together all of a sudden? What is going on?_

Garret's brow furrowed in confusion as he turned around. Even more birds were heading towards the town, the sounds of their wingbeats pulsing in a hurried frenzy. Garret wasn't exactly a biology expert, but even he knew that when birds freaked out like that, something was definitely wrong.

He picked up a faint smell in the heated air.

 _What is that? Smells like something burning. Scratch that. Something_ _ **really**_ _burning. Smells like…I don't know. Wood? No. Too rancid for wood. Gas? Nah, I would've known if it was gas. It's…_ _ **metal?!**_

Then he saw it.

A blazing flash in the sky, heating the air set markedly red against a halo of orange. It seared through the blue horizon, cutting it into two separate halves as it raced downward. A trail of grey lines marked its path as the mirrored halves scarred like glass struck by lightning. A cacophonous burst of sound announced the object's presence, leaving a ringing sensation in the bewildered spectator's ears. Screeching aftershocks almost left visible scratches across. Gases roiled as the grey lines traced its path, crashing headway into the distance.

Dull rumblings of Earth came out from the ground. Imprints were scorched into the sky; an after-image of the dramatic event. The horizon's halves then fixed themselves, and all that was left was an enveloping silence.

It was quick, but it had left its impression.

" _Holy_ _ **shit!**_ _"_ Garret yelled out, enraptured. His buzzing mind was still trying to process what had just happened. His mouth hung open in an O of surprise before it changed into a slightly dazed grin.

Meteor showers weren't particularly rare in Michigan. Garret had seen them a couple of times before. Usually they only appeared as vague lines of color, blurred by distance. But _this._ _ **This.**_ This was huge! The meteorite, by Garret's quick estimates, had landed less than twenty miles from Eaden.

In his bewildered stupor, Garret briefly reflected on how awesome space was. He also noticed the sound of door bells chiming as Aaron swung open the door.

" _Wow,_ that was quite a light show," the store owner mused as Garret spun around to face him. "Never seen something like that come out of the sky since that blue moon we had a couple years back."

"I know right! It landed off somewhere to the northeast. It just kind of came out of _nowhere_!" The young science enthusiast was beaming his excitement. He raised his arm to point in the direction the meteor had crashed, the other propped on his hip as he raised his posture to see out beyond the fields in the distance.

"Glad you liked it. Ya know, some folks say a shooting star like that is a good omen," Aaron remarked. "Knowing you, you need all the luck you can get." The elder man slightly laughed at this.

"Come on, you know I don't believe in that stuff. What's going to get Foxglove to work is effort and patience, not the vague promise of a space rock. Albeit, a very cool-looking space rock."

Garret began to collect himself as he made his way back towards the store.

Aaron held open the door for him, smiling that all-too-well knowing smile, but this time, with a subtle hint of pride.

"Well, with as much time as you've spent working on her, she sure is long overdue." He scratched his scraggly brunette hair and worked his way behind the counter. " _Anyway_ , cool space rocks or not, I'm gonna need you to get in gear a little bit. I'm going out of town for a couple of days this week handling the shipment from Depot. Travis has got a little under the weather, so I'm going to have to pick it up myself. I need you to hold down the store for me."

Garret perked up at this. Aaron rarely left him in charge on account of how "sniffing too much machine oil" had caused Garret to absentmindedly forget what he supposed to be doing instead of being buried in his work. _Especially_ since he started working on Foxglove. He just couldn't be working in two places at once, much as he wanted to.

Before he could get a word out-"And don't think I won't know if you start getting ideas. Screw this up, and I'll make you scrub the septic tank, _by hand_."

The young man's face fell with an almost ghastly stare. He started drumming his fingers on the cash register. Memories of previous encounters with the septic tank had left him scarred for life. Last time, he had taken three showers a day for two weeks and still smelled as if he had just bubbled out from a sealed toxic waste dump.

"Yes sir."

"Glad we understand each other."

With that, Aaron very purposefully slapped his employee's back twice, turned his attention to gather groceries for his regular trip to Chell's house/bakery, and left the engineer to his duties.

[-]

 _-Clang!-_

"I just don't seem to know what's come over me all of a sudden. First, my ears started hearing static all the time. I thought it was just because I left the radio on, thing always seems to check out at night, but it started happening all the time. Couldn't make out a word of what anyone was saying! Then, I started seeing purple, squiggly shapes in my eyes. You know the ones that you get after you stare into the sun too long…"

 _-Clang!-_

"…but I started seeing them all the time! They just wouldn't go away, even if I was sitting in total darkness. It reminded me of the time I accidentally got some lemonade in my eye. That was the summer back when Hershel came to visit me. He's such a sweetheart for coming all the way out here…"

 _-Clang! Hisssssssssssss-_

"…thrown my back out making that vase for Ms. Shirley. Dr. Dillon's always on my case about watching myself when doing physical labor. So, here I am half deaf, crippled, and with a broken kitchen sink. Thanks for doing this for me, by the way, dear."

"Uh-huh, sure thing ma'am," Garret replied from under a counter.

He had been half-listening to what Mrs. Emily Kent had been saying for the past half hour. He was busy trying to mend some pipes that had become crooked. As he hammered at them, they hissed in protest to being reshaped from the place they had settled, like a snake laying in a cool cave.

Mrs. Kent was a small, silver-haired woman who lived on the far side of town. She lived alone, so she always gave her sole attention to anyone who came over to her house. Her black eyes seemed to wander into places that other people could not see. She was wearing a dark, long skirt with a slightly frayed, crocheted, grey sweater. The wisps of her hair tried to escape a tightly bound bun, tied from years of practice. She was currently sitting at her kitchen table, fiddling with a small, brown radio.

Her voice was gentle, yet firm. It was the voice of the narrator of a stage play, commenting on all the character's motivations and actions. Most of these plays involved scenes from her own life. In her old age, however, it seemed that she even got more lost in them. It was now that Garret found himself the audience to one of her reveries.

"You must have so much to do. I know Aaron works you to the very bone. And I always see you working on…what did you call it again?"

"Foxglove, ma'am."

"Ah, yes! Foxglove. Pretty flower that is. You know it's said that that flower…."

Garret allowed her to continue on while he refocused his attention on the task at hand, slightly rolling his eyes. He didn't want to seem rude, but Mrs. Kent could literally go on for hours, and he _really_ wanted to get her pipes fixed so he could move on _to_ working on Foxglove. He continued listening to the ongoing commentary.

"…gave one to my cousin as a wedding present. Can you believe it? A can of pepper spray! The nerve! He acted as if he knew the relationship wasn't going to work out. Then again, they did divorce after she threw a hammer at him, but I digress. Speaking of hammers, you use that one quite well! You're a very _strapping_ young man, the kind a lady would abandon everything to have."

Garret winced at that. _**Strapping**_ wasn't exactly the word he would use to describe himself. Garret saw himself as more _rugged_ or just _built_. He had noticed that his observer had subtly made _him_ the direct subject of her soliloquy, always catching herself and addressing him directly. Besides, she was steering the half-conversation in a direction he wasn't comfortable with.

He tried to change the subject.

"How's your back doing, ma'am?"

"Oh, I'm fine. It just seems to want to dully ache today. Three days ago, I couldn't get out of bed because it just shot pain every time I tried to move. Used to be limber as a ballerina, now I can't even get ten feet in my own home without endangering my health. Oh, well. That reminds me, ballerinas…well, _dancing_ , I mean. I remember seeing you dancing at the Harvest Festival when you were still going to class at the hall. You were quite good! Do you still dance?"

Another wince, unnoticed because he was mostly hidden from view. A moment of unadulterated silence. A response.

"I…have _other…_ things preoccupying me these days. Like you said, the old man keeps me busy, and so do my personal interests."

Garret got up from under the counter after giving the pipes a final glance-over. Then, he tested to see if they were working. After he turned the valve, the pipes gave a short rumble, a jerk, and finally, water starting flowing normally from the faucet. Just in time, too.

"Well, Mrs. Kent, it seems your sink is all in working order," he said as he began swiftly picking up his tools.

"Thank you again, dear. I wish you luck on your radio tower. I know I'd be grateful for it. Darn radio has quit on me again, right in the middle of the weather report, too. How dreadful!" She said this as she continued turning the device's knobs for a channel that wasn't named SNOW FM.

"Goodbye, ma'am," Garret said to the door as he closed it behind him. Working his way down Mrs. Kent's porch steps, he wiped his brow and gave a small, unconscious sigh of relief.

It was an innocent question, really. It's just that, Garret usually didn't like talking about things that directly involved him personally. He felt it was just unnecessary to talk about them when he would forget about it the next day anyway. Especially after-

He was getting sidetracked.

Garret pulled his lifeline again from his pocket, and also pulled a bag from out the miniature version of his toolbox. His bag smelled of food, and his taste buds flooded his mouth as he pulled out a chicken leg. The hungry man placed the meat between his teeth, put his toolbox on one arm, and started reviewing his adjustments to Foxglove. He looked like a carnival juggler as he tried to balance everything as he walked, setting off into the tower looming in the distance.

[-]

Things had not gone well, today.

Well, that wasn't _entirely_ the truth.

Superficially, Garret had gotten everything on his task list done (well, except sleep). However, there was something that nagged at him.

He had done all of his planned adjustments on Foxglove, run all of the trials he had planned, and had even gotten her to boot up properly. There was just something _**missing**_. She had kept defaulting back to the same screen every time he tried to alter her code. He didn't know if it was a glitch, a processing error, a hardware issue, or user error on his part.

An empty, vague hole formed in his mind as he flopped onto the recliner in the stockroom. It was an old piece of furniture, like almost everything else in there, but it was a comfortable one. Especially to a man who had just spent the entire afternoon and early evening climbing up and down a twenty-foot jungle gym. Not to mention, four hours of sleep was also dragging at him. Garret had endurance, but not _that_ much.

It was frustrating and mentally exhausting, on top of being physically exhausted. As he laid back in the recliner, he reached on a nearby end table for a mason jar. It contained a brownish-red liquid that carried the tangy smell of alcohol. It was a personal mixture that Garret had come up with himself. He was an engineer; he liked to experiment with all sorts of things, including his beer. At least, it was partially beer.

Taking a swig of his mad brew, Garret observed the stockroom.

This place was a labyrinth of relics from Aaron's personal collection, things his family had brought in before him, and Garret's additions from whenever he went on a scouting trip for parts. Over the years, it had become an impossible maze of broken down cars, microchips, banners, paint cans, and just random memorabilia from time gone by.

Garret had pretty much taken over this room. It was his forge and his factory. The obsessed tech geek had always come here to meld together his ideas and make them into something possible. Aaron often gave him flack for Garret's unauthorized takeover, but his boss had let him have it in order to chase his insane pipe-dreams. No, literally, most of the stuff he built involved pipes or rods of some sort.

Although he never admitted it, Garret was always silently thankful that Aaron put up with him the way he did. It was most of the reason he hadn't given up on Foxglove in the first place. That and his pure pride and admiration for her wouldn't let him.

At first, Eaden had been all too eager to help him. Sometimes, he would have twenty people at a time to direct and lead as he pleased. They all caught up in the storm of limitless passion he brought with him, like a sort of mystical rain dance that was given to him from his ancestors.

However, over the years the volunteers had become less and less. Nowadays, it was either him alone, or Chell helping him however she could. He didn't know why she helped. She obviously had better things to do with her whole bakery business and almost obsessive habit of going out for runs around the town. And yet, she still helped.

He _really_ appreciated that. Especially since most of Eaden had pretty much started seeing Foxglove as more of the amusement of an insane man's delusions. Garret wasn't going to give up because he knew Chell believed in him and because Foxglove herself deserved it.

The insane man finished his brew and got up, planning to at least close up shop before he actually used his musty mattress for its intended purpose. It was currently late into the evening, with the sun's rays receding back behind the darkened earth. The stars were appearing on the canvas of indigo sky, no longer the ghosts they were in the morning hours.

As he went to clean off the counter, the chiming of the bells grabbed his attention. They had been particularly loud, resulting from the centripetal force of the door being yanked off its poor hinges. A woman with dark brown, curly hair wearing a jacket, white T-shirt, boots and dark jeans barged through it.

Garret recognized that it was Romy Hatfield, Chell's best friend of the female persuasion. He usually saw her either at her home/diner, making soup on the days she actually got customers, or chasing a pair of twin space marauders from knocking over the next unfortunate bystander. Those were her twin boys, Max and Jason. Right now, though, she was alternating her head to look in all directions, moving so fast Garret was afraid her head might screw off her neck.

" _ **GARRET! GARRET!**_ _**Are you here!?**_ " Her words came out of her mouth quick and strong, desperately searching for him. Her face was worn and ragged, with the look of someone who had just witnessed a multi-car crash on the freeway.

"I'm right here. You don't have to shout," Garret replied nonchalantly. He stumbled up to her, dragged by his increasing tiredness. "You sound as if your volume dial's set to eleven."

" _ **Garret!?**_ Oh thank God. You're here!" she sounded incredulously. She was speaking in short, clipped sentences in order to calm herself down.

"Yes, that is indeed my name, now what has got you so riled up that you had to try to send the front door to its early grave?'

Her brow furrowed. "Garret, I don't have time for your quippy nonsense. Where is Chell?"

"I don't know," he scratched the back of his head absentmindedly," I thought she might have been with you or at home. You know how she gets. Sometimes, she just wants to be left to her own devices."

"You haven't seen her either. Oh God, oh god-ohgodohgodohgodohgod-no, No-NO!" Romy stammered.

"Look, there's nothing to get praying to High Heaven about it."

" _ **Garret,"**_ she flatly stated. Her dusky eyes glared into his face-"You're not taking this seriously! I haven't seen her, you haven't- **no one has.** "

Her change in expression grabbed him by the head. A rising mixture of rotten dread, cautious fear, and foreboding crawled its way around his neck. He swallowed. Romy had his attention.

"Did you check the fields?"

"Yes."

"The Ottens'?"

"Yes!"

"The hall?"

"Yes, _Yes! I checked the whole freaking town, Garret!"_

"Did she leave a note?!"

"No, that's just it Garret. She left absolutely nothing. It's as if she just up and vanished! Nothing. Not a single _damn_ thing."

Garret knew what the next thing Romy would say, but he didn't want to hear it. He willed himself to block all sound from his mind so that he wouldn't have to hear it. But, his mind was too fast for him, letting him absorb every vicious detail.

" _Chell is_ _ **gone."**_


	3. The Silence

_**Chapter 2- The Silence**_

 _ **Kicking Holes in Walls**_

 _Silence is all we dread.  
There's Ransom in a Voice -  
But Silence is Infinity.  
Himself have not a face._

 _\- Emily Dickinson_

[-]

…" _she's gone!"_

 _The darkness swallowed up his cloudy eyes, pulse vibrating with adrenaline, his heart threatening to razor off his skin by beating so sharply._

" _She's probably staying at a motel in town. It is kind of late you know."_

" _She's never been gone this long!"_

" _Relax, look. If it makes you feel any better, I'll go get my coat on and drive out there myself if you're so worried."_

" _I'm coming with you!"_

" _Fine, but you stay close to me and behave yourself. Now go get a shirt on so the mosquitos don't have a feast with ya. I'll meet you out in the truck…"_

It took a moment for the severity of Romy's words to truly kick in before Garret's mind became aware of the severity of the situation. It snapped him back to reality.

Apparently, the harried woman truly believed that Chell had just left town without any notice whatsoever. Which was worrying, because it was not the first time she had done this.

It had been about four years ago, when Chell had first arrived in Eaden. She was just settling down into the abandoned ruin of a house that they had found for her.

It was a dinky, pathetic little thing. The walls had caved in slightly due to disrepair and weathering with holes in the roof. Wiring knocked loose from the crumbling walls entangled itself in every crevice and corner, giving the impression of a spider's den more than a rundown shack. The pipes had become alive with rust camouflage against the environment of mud and unspeakable _gunk_ that plastered the bottom frames. If the house had had a retail advertisement in the newspaper, it might have had the following description:

 **One Bedroom with no Bed**

 **One Bath, No Toilet or Shower**

 **One Open-Air Kitchen (Literally)**

 **Walls of Dirt**

 **Painted with Dirt**

 **Selling for Dirt Cheap**

 **Those with no sense of health hazards or general well-being please contact.**

The state of the interested future owner had not been much better. Her hair always was a nest of sweat and grease just waiting for a bird to take residence in. Hypothetical bird might have also gotten the wrong idea about the dirt covering her skin, mistaking it for a complimentary all-you-can-eat buffet of grubs and worms instead of a woman in dire need of a shower. Steel grey eyes were hardened with solid grit. Those eyes could have melted the brains out of any unfortunate onlooker who had been crazy enough to get close to her. Rings circled just above her cheekbones, leaving scars of exhaustion, tension, and distrust.

Romy had been the first one to find her all those years ago. Just one night, while everyone was busy settling down into their individual homes with snatches of idle chatter, as per usual routine in a small town such as Eaden , a creature had darted wildly into their midst. Its eyes darted to and fro amongst the townsfolk. Its eyes were wide with disbelief, as if the creature had never seen a human being in their entire life and was internally struggling with the thought of staying perfectly frozen so that the people wouldn't notice, or bolting right then and there into the wild black yonder from which it had come. It was poorly painted with a selection of bright colors that clashed with its earth-caked hide. White near the legs, orange-red on the waist, and blue on the face. They seemed to highlight the drawn out lines of fatigue scrawled on the creature's skin.

The young mother had held her hand out to the creature, a young woman clad in a worn, orange jumpsuit, with adrenaline threatening to cause the blood vessels in her arms to come dangerously close to bursting. Hydraulic pressure was set to red everywhere, and it drew every muscle taut. Romy had whispered words of comfort in her ears, something she had learned from years of practice from dealing with the childhood fears of her sons.

Garret would never forget the look in Chell's eyes that night. There was an emptiness to them, as if someone had taken an eraser and decided to eliminate all trace of reflected light from their surfaces. She had looked at all of them unflinchingly, never taking her eyes off their faces. It was as if she was afraid that if she looked away, then they would vanish right before her.

She hadn't trusted him then. Well, to be honest, she hadn't trusted _anyone_. There were walls surrounding her every move, every action, every intention.

Chell had taken off quite a few times in those first few weeks, not leaving any notice. Every time, it would drive Romy out her mind, until one day, Romy had gotten straight into Chell's face and screamed her frustrations into it. Garret figured that was what it took to finally have the walls start to recede. It was like a misplaced wooden block in a game of Jenga. It took Chell by surprise, left a gap in her perfectly constructed barricade, and caused at least _part_ of the tower of apprehension to lower itself until it became wooden pieces on the table. Chell had never left her hanging since (well at least, not without leaving a note).

That was why it was such a dire situation. She had done it before, but just not in a _very_ long time.

"Garret, I don't know what to do. I've looked everywhere, I've thought of every place she could be, she never left any note, _whatifsomething'shappenedtoher_ …"

"Whoa! Whoa…-easy there," Garret placed his hands on Romy's shoulders, trying to prevent an oncoming panic attack.

It took a few seconds, but her breaths eventually did slow down to a relatively safe pace. Garret had quietly gotten a wooden stool from behind the counter and guided her to sit on it.

"Better?"

"Yeah, sorry. I just lost my mind for a second there," the worried woman said as she put a hand to her forehead. She took a pause to look straight into Garret's eyes before continuing.

"I just—Garret, I don't know why I'm feeling this way, and you might think I'm not putting enough trust in her, but something is _wrong._ I-I just feel like _something_ is wrong here. _"_

"It's okay. If you feel something is wrong, then I'll take your word for it. Now, what exactly happened?"

Romy went on to describe how she had come in that morning to see her friend after her daily wrestling match between getting the tag team of ten-year-old troublemakers off to class and preventing Duke from bringing breakfast crashing to the floor in his excitement to join the fray.

She had come to a door that had been left ajar. While it was normal for people in Eaden to leave their doors unlocked, it was bizarre that Romy had found Chell's door open. She knew how much she valued her privacy.

Romy had invited herself in to see what had caused the sudden change, and had found the little house in disarray. The kitchen was the first room she had checked. Balls of dough coated in flour were sitting on the counter in a tray. The flour also coated parts of the stove, which was thankfully not left on. That was not unusual. Chell had discovered a natural talent for making baked goods and had eventually turned it into a living.

A small, semicircular white radio was turned to a classic rock and oldies station. The songs that came out of it were filtered through the regular static and crackle, making parts of the song blare out of the speakers at random intervals.

In the living room, cushions on Chell's simple couch were hanging halfway off the armrests. Upstairs had not been much better, with the hallway littered with random assortments of clothing tossed about the hall. Not like Chell at _**all**_.

It was like an artist had decided to create a still-life of someone who has just woken up late for a job interview, rushed out of the house, and _ohgodIhopeIhaven'tmissedthebus-_ It was creepy. This house was definitely lived in, but there was no one here. The artist had stopped time and suddenly erased whoever lived there out of existence. Plenty of evidence that the resident had been there, but not a trace of them to be seen.

It was _very_ creepy. That was the sign Romy had taken that something was off.

"I figured she just had something really urgent to attend to, so I decided to go back home and see if I could catch her later," Romy recalled as she stared out the door, "The boys came home from school and _of course_ begged me to take them to go get that raisin bread they're so addicted to."

She turned her gaze back to Garret, brow drawn in worry, "But when we came back, the house was _still_ like that! Even the door was still open! I didn't know what to do! I-I just decided to send the boys home, and then I just looked. Asked pretty much the whole **damn town** if they had seen her! And now… even you…"

As her words trailed off, Garret came up to her and put a reassuring hand on her shoulder.

"Look, I see now how worried you are. I'm sorry I didn't take you seriously earlier. But…getting our heads screwed off with panic and looking for our bodies isn't going to help. You know how she is. Like you said, something urgent probably grabbed her attention, or maybe she just doesn't want to see anybody today," Garret hoped his words would bring her back to a reasonable state of mind.

He let go and thoughtfully stroked his beard, allowing his buzzing mind to feed him a plan of action.

"Tell you what. Why don't you go home, relax, and go to bed. I'll do it, too."

Romy gave him a pointed look that showed just how much she didn't agree with that statement.

"No, no, no... hear me out. We both get some rest. That way, we can both get up real early, say about 6:00. If she's not back by then, then we can both take my truck, and go look for her. We'll have clearer heads. Sound reasonable?" He half-shrugged and held out his hands in a gesture that offered the conversation back to her for her opinion.

After a moment of serious consideration, Romy stood up, placed a hand to her forehead, and sighed deeply. Her panic released in a long breath of air, replaced by her silent acknowledgment and exhaustion.

Maneuvering around the pyramid of paint cans, she grabbed the side of her jean jacket and pulled it closer to her side. Her head was bowed towards the floor. Garret could see the wide-eyed weariness as she stared at the unique variations in the planks of hardwood.

Following her to the door, Garret decided to show an upstart act of courtesy and opened it for her. The bells chimed in right on cue.

She suddenly turned to halfway face him.

"I will tell you one thing, she'd better be fortunate that _**I**_ don't find her. If I do, I'll kill her," she grumbled in a low voice more to affirm with herself the boundaries of what exactly the amount of crap she would put up with.

"Want me to get a shovel?"

"Tch…Rickey, you just don't know when to quit, do you?"

Romy was making an expression that many people gave him when they were becoming annoyed with his regular comedy routine- a raised eyebrow and their mouth drawn in a line that just said- _Really?_ _ **Really?**_

His misty eyes cleared up slightly as he gave a mischievous grin. "I like to think of it as looking at the bright side of things, Ms. Hatfield. We all cope with stress in different ways. You like to realistically worry and consider all the consequences. I, on the other hand, blatantly disregard reality with sarcasm as a cheap attempt at optimism. Always like to keep the glass half full."

She let out a snort, "You sound like a fortune cookie."

Romy shook her head and looked at Garret again, seeing his calm, steady gaze. His head looked like it had just randomly combusted with the way his blonde hair reflected the receding sunlight. It wasn't an engulfing blaze, but a continuous yellow-orange glow, like a metal bar cooling on an anvil after being pulled from the forge. It lingered with warmth. The warmth was reassuring, comforting.

She straightened her jacket again and gave a fond smile. "Good night, Garret."

And with that, Garret watched her leave.

Pulling the door closed to the tune of those punctual bells, the overworked employee seceded to his own tiring mentality. Despite being the living incarnation of a steam engine that never quit, he, too, was human, and had long gone beyond the limits of what four hours of sleep could provide.

He looked out the door in Romy's direction, hoping that maybe he had at least given her some peace-of-mind. She had always tended to let her emotions run high and her short temper take control when she deemed something disgusting or unfair. When she got like that, even Chell had to back away to give her some breathing room. _Nobody_ wanted to be near the single mother when she got into one of _those_ moods. Garret figured that maybe the fact that she raised two ten-year-old sons who always compulsively tried to literally jump into every cavernous hole and climb every tree around town had something to do with it. ( _Hey bro, watch this!)_

It was because of this that Romy automatically adopted a motherly-worried attitude whenever trouble arose. Not just with her actual children, but when it came to her friends as well. Romy knew that Chell could very much take care of herself, but that still didn't mean she didn't worry. And although she and Garret weren't as close to each other as they were to her, he knew that she viewed him the same way.

At this moment in his reverie, while shutting out the lights and straightening up the counter, Garret's mouth decided it just had to invite all of the flies in the room to come inside it and come have a picnic on top of his molars. In fact, one of them almost ended up impaled on his right incisor when it swooped in to reserve its spot. It left the scruffy man sputtering and internally wondering what purpose they had besides being nature's annoyances.

 _Alright, enough,_ he thought as he shambled upstairs, _Got to get some sleep before I end up introducing my face to the floor._

He didn't even get to turn out his own bedroom light before darkness consumed his fading vision, opting to instead reintroduce his face to his ragged sheets.

[-]

 _He was running._

 _He was chasing after someone. Specifically, a woman. A grey, faded out image of a woman. He couldn't tell who she was because she was running too fast for him to see clearly._

 _Was she blonde? Did she have black hair? Red? Was she tall or short? What was she wearing? It didn't seem to matter. He just knew he had to catch up to her._

 _They were running along a broken rut of a road. The scenery distorted into tunnel-like walls that stretched out towards her. Always towards her. Whoever she was._

 _His lungs screamed in pain, but he didn't care. Every muscle screamed for him to just_ _ **STOP**_ _. But he couldn't. Not this time._

 _He had to catch her, before she fe-_

 _Oh no._

 _OH NO- NO_ _ **NONONONO…**_

…he hit his head on the wall.

"OUCH! Shit! Oh, come on! In the _same spot_ _ **!**_ "

Garret clutched his head with both hands as he held onto the renewed pain. Somehow, he had rolled from his face onto the back of his shoulder in his unconscious struggle. And just by good old Lady Luck, he had managed to get his head in just a primed position to smack itself in just the same way in order to break more blood vessels in the back of his head. It was a wonder he didn't have brain damage.

Picking himself up off the mattress, he groggily slunk over to the window to see if he had overslept. Nope, just the opposite. The night sky was penetrated only by a slice of moonlight, as if someone had punctured a hole in the universe with a very large pocket knife. Clouds rolled along in silence. They never once touched that curve in the sky, as if they were afraid if they did then the tear would get bigger and swallow them up.

Garret estimated that it was about 2:30 in the morning, since none of the town's lights were on. Eaden tended not to have much of a night life because its location smack dab in the middle of Nowhere, Michigan tended to not give it much in terms of lighting in the late hours. Power lines were hard to come by when most of the roads around were either overgrown with plants, rutted out dirt, or just didn't exist in the first place.

 _Everyone is sound asleep,_ he thought with a mental sigh, _except for me._

One advantage of being a heavy sleeper was that Garret could not be roused by anything. Trust him, Aaron had tried. The young man just had an internal switch on his brain that he could flip off at will and rest in a dreamless, soundless coma. However, this came with a couple of drawbacks. For one, Garret could not easily be awakened in an emergency. Another, which was causing his current restlessness, was that his buzzing mind just wouldn't stop nagging at him. That was the problem. The thing keeping him up was internal.

The engineer decided to take a logical approach to his insomnia through trial-and-error.

 _Am I hungry?_ No, he immediately crossed off that thought because he had snacked on some sausage while stocking shelves.

 _Is it something I ate?_ Garret knew that sometimes he ate things others would use the term _expired_ for, but to him, food was food. Judging himself fine by previous experiences with questionable foods, he deemed this explanation invalid as well. He also crossed off the fact that his throbbing skull had anything to do with it, since he had recovered from the first morning incident.

 _Ok, nothing physical, then. Maybe, it's something mental?_ Other than his recent head injury, the young man was perfectly sound. Well, as sound as someone who thought continuous exposure to running machinery, circuitry, and hazardous chemicals were a jolly good old time, could be.

 _Then it has to be something emotional._ Garret almost physically shied away from the word.

He was a man who tended not to use the word "feelings" or "emotions". Those were abstract, misleading words. No, he tended to like to think of those responses inside of his grey matter as simple, solvable chemical reactions that could be dealt with. He liked to name his emotions outright, like pinning a fuzzy, eye-imitating, moth to a corkboard on a wall. That way he could categorize them, pin them to their source, and calmly deal with them in his own manner.

For example, the dream that had woken him up in an upstart state of alertness. That was not normal. It had also left him sweating profusely, with his hair threatening to crawl off his arms and out of his pores. These were common signs of the human fight-or-flight response. So, something had startled him so badly that his body thought it had to preserve itself. Perfect.

The confused man moved to lean on his desk. His eyes glanced over his pile of sketches as he ordered his mind to recall any scraps of dream-memory it could get.

He had been running.

That was a good start. He was no expert on dreams, he doubted anyone was, but that usually indicated that someone was afraid of something.

 _Fear_ _ **.**_ No, that word was still too vague. Garret needed more details.

What was he running from? Nope, scratch that, he was running _**towards**_ something. Thank you for the memo brain control.

 _Wait, what am I afraid of that would cause me to run toward it? That makes no sense._ Brain control appropriately made Garret's face contort into an even more confused, annoyed snarl with accompanying raised eyebrow and skyward eye roll.

 _Wait, maybe it's not something I'm afraid_ _ **of**_ _. Maybe, it's something I'm afraid_ _ **for**_ _._ The landscape in his dream had looked like a faded, blurred photograph, but he remembered his viewpoint had always been forward. He had been chasing towards something like his own life depended on it. Chasing after it like he knew something was coming and that he needed to protect it.

 _Worry_ _ **.**_

The mist in Garret's eyes lifted as this word entered his thoughts. Brain control also altered his facial expression to match the visual representation of this word, mixed with a touch of surprise and scorn.

 _Me? Worried?_ _About what, the crickets suddenly rebelling against natural order and eating the birds?_ His brain scoffed at the idea. Garret was not a worrier. In fact, he was the most laid-back guy he knew. Heck, the entire world could go through another alien apocalypse, humanity could be destroyed, and it could turn out that he was a sleeper agent for the invasion, and he'd still be smiling that smug, yet loving grin that made it look like his mouth was Moses parting the golden, furry sea to lead his teeth to the Promised Land.

Garret had narrowed it down. There was only one possibility of someone he could be **worried** for.

Rummaging through the crawlspace of his closet, he quickly changed into a T-shirt and overalls. While kicking on a pair of his old, brown work shoes, his mind mentally scolded him for being a hypocrite and not following his own advice.

[-]

He _really_ should have followed his own advice.

Garret was heading to the front of Chell's doorway, about a five minutes' walk from the store in good daylight. However, due to the only constant light source being only a fraction of its size at this time of the month, it would take at least double for him to finally arrive.

It wasn't that Garret was going to get lost. He had lived in Eaden since he was six. No, the problem was losing Eaden itself. It was such a small town that one misstep off of the two roads that ran through it and you would either end up in the middle of the woods or rolling along the ocean of weeds in the Boneyards beyond the Ottens' fields. And right now, nature was not helping him one bit.

The summer night was alive and thriving. Crickets sent musical Morse code messages to each other in a sort of constant pulse. Their responses were quick, bouncing off each other in a reverse echo that actually got louder over time. Cicadas buzzed along while hanging onto the sides of houses. Small, scurry things rustled along in the wild grasses that dotted the roads, making the plants sway back and forth in a haphazard dance to the tune of the insects. There was a low-constant moaning providing the bass for this strange cacophony of sound.

It was just the usual activity of nocturnal wildlife around this time of year, but somehow, the faded blackness seemed to amplify every sound into a twisted, hollow version of itself. The effect was similar to the background noise of a classic horror film, back when movies were recorded on actual film. It was eerie to say the least. If Garret wasn't used to this seasonal over-activity, he might have even called it maddening. But, since he was, it was only mildly annoying.

What was even more annoying was the seasonal over-activity of mosquitos. Currently, they had decided to go into attack formation and initialize the first phase of Operation Feeding Frenzy. This entailed half of the pests flying around Garret's ears in order to distract him, and the other half to go for every part of exposed skin they could sense. Phase 2 involved the usual-par-for-course sticking miniscule needles into his skin and gorging themselves on his blood. He had forgotten to put on bug spray before making his way outdoors, so the poor man was constantly waving his arms around his face as if he was a student urgently flagging an unsuspecting teacher because he had to desperately visit the restroom.

Overall, Garret was **not** having a fun time, and the continuous dust cloud of feasting black disease-carriers was not helping his mood.

Stepping onto the threshold of Chell's residence, Garret couldn't help but take in the bizarre atmosphere.

It seemed as if Romy had left in a hurry because the door was still left open. It slightly creaked as air almost imperceptibly moved past. The house itself was shaded in varying shades of gray, a filter of grayscale texture mostly framed by the darkness around it. The gray was highlighted in odd places by white glare being reflected by moon's sliver, a tear in the fabric of velvet abyss.

The door cast a sharp, slanted shadow to the right of its frame, as if someone had spilled blotted, black ink that seeped put and filled the opening into a cavernous entrance. There were no lights or shadows coming from inside the house, leaving the entrance completely empty of color. Absence of sound was also present. Whereas the road to the house had not had one inch of peace from the night's wailing song of choral dissonance, melancholy, and primal wildness, here there was strangely no sound but the creaking. Even then, it had stopped soon after he had arrived.

Just absolute silence.

The door's shadow had started to slip and slither its way around Garret's neck, leaving a slinking trail and tracing its claws in smooth semicircles down his upper back, into his spine. The hairs were standing at attention, signaling to brain control the first signs of some lurking, unknown danger.

Romy was right. Something was just…. _wrong_.

Garret swallowed the lump that had gorged itself into his breathing tubes and took a step forward. The shadow had moved to slink closer to him, inviting him into its lair for the feast. The feast of his uneasiness and uncharacteristic panic.

The young man decided to completely unblock his throat by swallowing several times. He couldn't beat the shadow, but he could dispel the silence. He motioned his mind to work the muscles in his throat to come online again and work his voice box to form words as ammunition.

It first chose an uneasy greeting.

"He-hello?"

No response.

He tried again, much more firmly.

"Hello, is anyone in there? Or is it just me hollering at shadows?"

Again, no response.

He chose a different tactic, assume it was the owner of the household in order to establish familiarity.

"Chell? Is that you?" He approached the entrance and cupped a hand to his mouth to physically project his voice further, "It's me, Garret. Are you home? Listen… I-I don't mean to barge in on you at this time of night, but the circumstances seem to call for it. Romy told me that you had taken off without letting anyone know and came in worried sick about you. Just wanted to see if you had come back from-whatever it was you were doing."

As he made his way into the house, he began to survey the area and compare it to the information that Romy had provided him with. Although there wasn't much visual input to go by, what with the light being barely present, he could at least ascertain that the house was indeed in a state of disarray. He had to carefully avoid tripping over the edge of the rug in front of the couch. It had been partially flipped over, exposing the gridded plastic underside.

Toeing it back to its proper fabric appearance, Garret nimbly and carefully made his way towards the kitchen, the literal and metaphorical heart of the house. The radio on the windowsill made no reaction to his footsteps approaching. It had been switched off, probably by its previous visitor. Garret decided to call out again.

"Chell? Cheeeell?"

Then he heard it.

A rustling, crumpling sound like the sound tissue paper makes when being folded in between the spaces between someone's fingers. It wasn't a very loud sound, but the lack of other sounds made it stand out.

Garret's mind quickly processed any possibilities as to the source and quickly discarded both the possibilities of it coming from the wildlife outside or the house itself. There was something-some _ **one**_ in the house messing with Chell's belongings.

And they were coming closer.

He decided to assume familiarity again in order to combat his body's hormones beginning to pump primal panic into his arteries. "Chell? Is that you?.. Come on, don't play games now, I can hear you. Just… come…on out…where you're visible.."

Only more rustling in response. It was coming from upstairs, in the direction of Chell's bedroom.

"Alright, that's enough. I'm not joking here! **Who's there?!** _**Come on out!**_ "

The rustling was accompanied by a scraping of something against wood, etching its mark into the grain and across his frontal lobe. The mark came with aftershocks of energy that rattled and ricocheted between his brain and his skull. Garret closed his eyes for a moment and focused this energy in preparation for conflict, whether it be escape or struggle.

This was what he usually did when things got hairy. Being able to harness the body's natural response to danger and channel it into pure, calm focus was a skill Garret had honed in his many machine accidents. One careless misstep and you could end up with two less fingers or one less arm. His buzzing mind condensed, reconfigured, and muted all external distraction to become a slate-an emotionless calculator of stimulus, action, and reaction.

He opened his eyes, a sharp blue-grey titanium. Garret spread his legs out into a lower, defensive stance. With gorilla arms raised, he took slow, purposeful steps, never losing that stance as he made his way up the stairs. His fingers were set, yet relaxed, ready to make a vice-grip on whatever foolish, cowardly sap had decided to try to rob Chell's house while she was away. Even if she wasn't here, they would have to deal with _him_.

Judging by the increased rustling noise they were making, there were only two possibilities.

One: This person hadn't heard him shouting (in which case, _wow_ , they were deaf) and he still had the element of surprise.

Two: They had heard him and were trying to escape or just didn't care. This added the risk of the perpetrator carrying a weapon, probably a handheld gun. However, Garret trusted his reflexes enough to be able to dodge any attacks, disarm them, and pin them against a solid surface.

He reached the bedroom door, which was partly open. Couching down lower, he prepared himself. Time to move.

Bashing open the door, the man made for the source of the noise in one deft lunge. It didn't take long for Garret to wrestle the attacker to the ground, using his body weight to become an immovable mass and his hands a clamping prison.

The attacker scribbled beneath his fingers, writhing and hissing their scrawny body every which twisted way to break out of the hold. An inhuman _scream_ erupted from their throat that rattled the man's inner ears and set the fluid in them skirting into whirlpools around his cholera. Their claws were raked at his flesh, trying to create bloody ribbons of skin to decorate Garret's arms.

Wait a minute. _Claws_?

In the midst of the pit of unflinching force and storm of dizzy and fuzzy adrenaline that danced across Garret's gaze, he recognized some features of the attacker. Yellow eyes full of terror, one that looked half-glazed over in frosted glass. Silvery hair with splotches of red. A highly grizzled muzzle. Garret's face fell flat.

It was a fox.

"Goddammit, Scruffy."

Releasing his hold, the creature skirted to the far side of the room, back arched and bristling. The individual hairs of his back separated in pointed strips, giving the impression of a silver, blazon aura surrounding him. Empty eye was trained on his assaulter, even in its unseeing state. Teeth were bared around black lips, just inviting the human to try that stunt a second time, see what happens. His tail swished in a fiery cloud, like a train of smoke escaping the wreckage of a dying forest fire. The tail's shadow skirted back and forth, as if it was taunting the human to come closer. Low, deep-throated growls were the only sounds this intruder made now.

The adrenaline began to seep out of Garret's blood and out through the pores of his skin in the form of cold sweat. If he wasn't currently recovering from his body's onslaught, then he would have face-palmed from the sheer absurdity of the situation. His mind receded to its swarming, buzzing self and made his face create an expression of sheer annoyance. He sighed and began to walk towards the animal.

"Shoo! Go on! Go _**on**_ -get out! Get out, you mangy crawl-of-skin! _Shoo, get!_ " the harried engineer shouted as he chased away the little nuisance, "Scruffy, if you don't get out right now, I'll shoot you next time I see you! Go, get!"

Scruffy seemed to take the hint as he hurriedly scrambled downstairs and out the door. Somehow, the rug once again became turned in on itself as the burglar made his escape. Even when he didn't intend it, the fox seemed to always cause a mess.

 _I swear that son of a gun is going to get himself killed one of these days_ , Garret scoffed as he followed to make sure the fox didn't come back. _If not by me, then probably by Martin. Or in a fight with Duke. Or just by dumb luck._

This particular fox came from the woods, making Eaden his residence about nine months ago. He was an elderly gray, with an underside of crimson, with piercing yellow eyes and a large jaw. The left eye was blind, surrounded by matted and scarred flesh, probably from a scuffle with some larger, stronger animal. His body was thin, but muscled, making him a slippery target. It was by pure luck that Garret had even got his hands on him. There was white near his nose, a telling sign of his age and experience.

Martin Otten, the man who owned most of the farmland around town, had had to regularly chase off the troublemaker from getting into his chicken coop on several occasions. The fox's craftiness and slender body allowed him to slip in between the wires of the fence surrounding it. There had been many times where Mr. Otten had tried to shoot the pest, but for some reason, he always got away. Besides that, Scruffy seemed to always get into other residences in Eaden, especially Romy's house. Duke had done his job as guard dog and gotten into constant death matches with him, but again, he always seemed to get away with his life. Sometimes, the citizens swore they saw the fox smiling, that he caused trouble on purpose to entertain himself.

Due to these incidents, the wild animal was known unofficially as The Menace of Eaden, bringing chaos and mischief in his trotting paws. Garret had been witness to many of these incidents by pure coincidence, although his repair work may have had to do something with it. He hated to admit it, but he found most of them strangely amusing, and had gotten attached to the animal. He called him Scruffy because the fur around his muzzle was grizzled, making it appear as if the old jester had a scraggly beard that was even thicker than Garret's sun-gold testament to nature's recurring growth. It also had to do with the fact that Scruffy liked to also mess around Garret's workspace, getting filings stuck in his coat. For some reason, the fox liked to specifically target Garret, as if it was his way of showing affection to annoy the living bageebus out of the misfortunate tinkerer.

He found Chell's pebble lamp near where Scruffy had been hiding in the corner, a handy little thing that had a long battery life due to it being charged by bioluminescent algae. He turned it on by pressing the translucent plastic top, it slowly coming on and radiating the bare walls in warm atmosphere.

The walls had been painted an off-white color, allowing the light to reflect more easily and fill the room. There was a single mattress with a worn comforter next to one wall, with no other furniture in sight. A large cloth drape hung in front of a single window, blocking out the outside world. In a corner, a woven basket full of laundry sat spilling out its contents from Scruffy the Terrible's raid. It sat next to a small closet with a rickety, paneled door with several slotted holes due to missing pieces.

It was very plain and not much to look at. The walls had no decorations of any kind; no photos, artwork, or posters of long-dead or currently alive celebrities. Just four white walls, a ceiling, a floor, a mattress, a closet, a laundry basket, and a lamp. Not very homely in the least. It seemed more like a prison cell for a convicted murderer awaiting death row in solitary confinement than someone's bedroom. At least, it was certainly giving off that impression.

Garret knew it wasn't his place to comment on the decorative, or lack thereof, tastes of his quiet friend, but in his unnecessary and humble opinion, this room was in serious need of a repaint, recolor, and something to just liven up the place a little. Make it a little more personal, you know?

 _Even I have some things up on my walls, and I live in an attic for Pete's sake_ , Garret mused, _Oh, who am I kidding? I woke up underneath a workbench. Who am I to talk about how a living space should look like when I barely spend time in mine?_

It was true that Garret did not spend much time in his attic/bedroom/bathroom/study. Usually, he only spent time in there to sleep, freshen up, or look over his sketches on the days he couldn't go outside. However, Garret had tried to make the little space he had reflect himself, as haphazard and alarming it was in its current state. His bookshelves were there to keep all his technical manuals and references in a place where he could easily reach them. The desk had been placed under the window so he could get the view of the entire town from outside, an easy thing to do when you lived in a higher vertical position than everything else. He had a few pictures stowed underneath his bed in an album for the rare days he felt reflective and nostalgic. There was even an old electric guitar being suffocated somewhere in the hurricane of debris perpetually shifting around.

So, even if he never spent much time in it, it was still _his_. It was still something he had spent time and effort on in order to at least feel like home.

This room, though. This room was no home. It was a prison. A precise, concrete prison of slate, wood, emptiness, and silence. Even the radiance of the lamp could not get rid of the lack of sound. It was the silence that did it. The profound presence of absolutely nothing. It was a contradiction. A terrifying one. A terrifying paradox of uncertainty and foreboding. Because in that silence, you didn't know what kind of things were being held in here-what things were shackled inside. What things were choked back and strangled with chains of silence. The things that whimpered and cried and _screamed_ without sound. Or, maybe it wasn't what was being kept in that was important. Maybe it was being kept from being let _**out**_.

Garret looked to the corner of the mattress. He saw an outline of the holes in the walls. He knew they were there. He had seen her make them, about three years ago.

 _His mind was fuzzy._

 _It had been quite a day for Garret Rickey. He had just finished work on his latest project: turning this poor excuse for a rundown shack into a decent living space for their newest resident. A young woman by the name of Chell._

 _She wasn't exactly the social type. Never really spoke to anyone. Never really tried to become part of the small town social scene. She never actively sought out attention. In fact, it seemed she was much rather inclined to avoid it if at all possible. It was like she was an ethereal being from another dimension, simply content to observe and study this world's inhabitants for her own curiosity. She might as well have been a ghost. No, literally. She had just up and appeared one day from the mist, running with the whipping winds at her heels and the sun at her back. No one knew where she had come from. Her past was a complete mystery._

 _That's what Aaron had started calling her. 'Mystery girl'. If Garret had to be honest, it wasn't very original. But, the old man never listened to him when it came to this sort of thing. It had taken them forever just for her to trust them enough with her own_ name _, so, maybe Aaron was just trying to get her to trust him by bestowing her with that frivolous moniker._

 _In any case, people tended not to pry into each other's private lives around here anyway, so it really made that point moot._

 _She sure did stand out, though. She didn't really have anything unusual about her appearance. Well, Garret had to admit she was a very attractive young lady, but nothing too outlandish as far as physical traits go. Her gray eyes, tan skin, and facial features may have subtly hinted at a mixed ancestry, but again, nothing too unusual._

 _It was her attitude that did it. There was a_ presence _about this woman. You could feel it. It was in the way she walked, moved, sat, stood, ran, threw, and all the other actions in between. Hell, she could just stand perfectly still and you could still feel her presence from halfway across the Boneyards. She always held her head perfectly erect on top of her shoulders; her torso, elbows, hips, knees, and feet all clicking into place underneath in impeccable form. Everything she did was with purpose. Every action, intentional; every word, necessary. This kind of blunt presence only further isolated others from becoming acquainted._

 _However, she was honest, hardworking, intelligent, and stubborn._ **Especially** _stubborn. Garret had learned that_ _ **real**_ _quick._

 _When Garret had started work on her house, he had found her methodically weeding out the inside frames and tearing out the parts that were eaten through by moss. Every time he had tried to strike up a friendly conversation, she had ignored him and continued to pull out vegetation. Garret had at first thought she had not heard him, so he went to put his hand on her shoulder. No sooner had the repairman gotten within ten feet of her, she had grabbed his arm, thrown him into the air, and had him flipped onto his backside, legs up in the air like an overturned tortoise that was the victim of cruel human adolescents. And she had gone right back to what she was doing without even a slight turn of her head or gaze of unadulterated fury._

 _That was also when Garret had learned that she did not like it when people touched her._

 _He had gone to Aaron to complain, but all the old man had done was laugh very excessively about the fact that a woman who weighed only about a hundred-and-thirty pounds had just basically suplexed him into the raw dirt. So apparently, Garret had to wait to be_ allowed _onto an abandoned ruin to begin his work. Because it might have been a hollowed out, moss-ridden, flea-infested, pathetic, and just sorry excuse of a living space but it was_ hers _and there was no way she would let him in until it was up to her strict standards._

 _Even when she had done the best she could do by herself and reluctantly allowed him onto her property, she would never leave his side as he began repairs. She would stare at him, study him, learn how he held the tools in his grip, put them to use, and how he filled the walls in place. Eventually, she would begin to ask questions, and he would answer them to the best of his ability. They would spend hours like that, Garret carrying the conversation, with Chell occasionally inputting her opinion. She had picked up on quite a few carpentry skills very quickly, and actively assisted the young man wherever she could._

 _Seeing how much she had learned from building the frame, the engineer had gone to teach her about water pipelines and their basic repair. He had also tried to teach her basic electrical wiring, but for some reason, she had shied away from his attempts._

 _It had taken them about a year. The house had just recently had the final electrical appliances installed into the kitchen, just a simple oven and a fridge, something that she had left him to do by himself._

 _Over that year, Garret had taken a liking to her, despite their abrupt first encounter. The conversations had become a little less about practical things in front of them and more about personal things. Mostly things about himself, the town, and the people who lived there._

 _But he had learned some things about her, too._

 _He had learned that she didn't like to be controlled by_ anyone _, seeing herself as too independent and self-confident in her own abilities to allow anyone to dictate how her life should be. She genuinely liked being around these people, but she just naturally felt there was no need to socialize heavily with them. Just enough so that she was reminded that there were other human beings around. That she was sorry that she nearly broke his collarbone, but to please ask consent before being allowed to touch her, she had had bad experiences in the past._

 _That she was content for the first time in her life, and truly happy that Eaden was the place that she had ended up staying in. That she had damn well earned that contentment, too, judging by the scars that he would notice she had around her arms, legs, and eyes. That her face lit up entirely the first time she had genuinely laughed at one of his "priceless witticisms" about having to put up living with the man he worked for._

 _They had built this house together over a year. However, that wasn't the only thing. Garret genuinely believed that this blunt, stubborn, intelligent, woman and he had begun to build a lasting friendship._

 _So here he was, with a job well done, a good year behind him, a stomach full of alcohol, and a new friend to boot. Especially a friend who had found him completely intoxicated and let him sleep on top of her new couch._

 _Life was good for Garret Rickey._

 _ **-Thump, thump-**_

 _Being in the half-drunken state that he was, Garret had at first thought the sound that he heard was just his own head throbbing from nerve damage. He didn't pay it any mind._

 _-_ _ **Thump, thump, thump-**_

Ok… now this is just getting' creepy, _he struggled to think as bubbly sensations coaxed him to go back to sleep,_ who's up at this hour?

 _ **-Thump, thump,**_ **THWACK!** -

- **BOOOM!-**

" _Alright, what's goin on?" the drunk slurred as he slowly raised himself to his feet, "who hassz the bright idea of-of makin' all thisssss noise atta this time at night?"_

 _Scratching the back of his head, he got up and shuffled his way towards the source of the noise. A hand he constantly held to his head was splayed across his face; the other hand held onto the wall for support._

 _The source of the noise was coming from upstairs, from Chell's bedroom. He made his way to the closed door and knocked half-heartedly._

" _Hey, lady, you all right in there? Sounds like you, uhhhh, have a bit of aa 'guest' takin' residance in your uh, walls. Hehe," he slightly chuckled at his euphemism for a wild animal trapped between the walls, "you, uh, gotta that covered?"_

 _-_ _ **THUMP, CRASH….**_ **THWACK!** _ **-**_

 _He quickly sobered up a bit as his mind processed the magnitude of the damage implied by crashing._

" _Alright, thas it. I'm coming in, Chell. I know you don't like it, but thas an awful lot of noise and I'm worried you aren't awake for it."_

 _He slowly opened the door and his eyes immediately widened in shock._

 _The room was in tatters. Comforter and sheets were tied into double and triple Gordian's knots around each other, half shoved onto one side of the mattress. There were dents in the walls freshly made with cracks with ran up into the white paint, making it fleck off like the leaves of an ashen, sickened tree. The closet door had been folded in on itself, with the pebble lamp on its poor side next to it. There were holes in the walls, not big ones, but still holes right behind the mattress._

 _Chell was standing right in front of those holes, broken skin near the sides of her feet where she had kicked it. Her eyes were focused straight on the wall, with an unflinching, wound-tight focus that just screeched bloody murder. Her body was tense, muscles drawn tight against bone. Her throat was constricted, and her mouth was drawn back in an expression of pure determination._

 _Judging by the state of the room, it was clear that Chell was sleepwalking and unaware of her surroundings. She had been throwing the lamp around as a projectile against the closet, explaining the_ _ **thwacking**_ _sound. The_ _ **BOOM**_ _had probably been when she kicked the wall, using so much force the walls were sent shaking. The other sounds only-God-knows how she did it. And she had done it all without speaking a_ word _._

 _Garret had no idea what was going on in that mind of hers, to drive her to act like_ this _._

 _Garret didn't know, and it scared him out of his mind._

 _Scared him so badly that he slowly walked out of the room, painstakingly closed the door, and crept right back to the couch. His mind refused to consult him on the matter, and in a matter of moments, he was completely unconscious._

Garret collected himself and set to the task of reversing the damage done to the residence: straightening up the pillows cast aside, throwing the half-eaten bread dough in the trash, flipping the rug over again, and picking up the loose articles of clothing.

He and Chell had built this house together, yet he was still terrified of what had happened within its walls.

Should he have woken her up that night? Should he have shown her it was all just a terrible, malevolent ruse that her mind had conjured in the midnight hours? Was it cruel to allow her to suffer through something that obviously terrorized her to the point that she was destroying what she had worked so hard to build?

Garret had been asking himself these questions ever since he had convinced himself they had not just been a delusion of late-night celebrating. Currently, his answer was no. Definitely not.

Chell was a woman who could take care of herself, no questions asked. And it was very clear that whatever she had suffered through, she did not want to share with _anyone_ , not even him. However, the real reason Garret said no was because he had _**no idea**_ _what_ _ **was going on**_.

That was the thing that scared him.

He had no clue as to what Chell had gone through, no lingering notion on the subject. Maybe, he figured, it wasn't even his place to dwell on the subject. Garret had no idea, no clue, the _Hell_ she had gone through, so how dare he put his opinion in on the subject. He had never asked, and she had never talked.

 _Maybe that needs to change,_ Garret thought to himself as he made his way outside of the dwelling, closing the door behind him. There was no way he was going to risk an actual burglar coming into the house, as unlikely as that was. He could have sworn the shadows at his back were fingering their way down his shirt collar, getting a kick out of his misery in silent snickers.

In the double-or-so five minutes it took the miserable man to reach home, he ordered his mind to feed him a plan of action. The mosquitos resumed their guerilla warfare, but this time they went unopposed. One thing was for sure, he was not going to get any more sleep tonight.

 _I'll just get into my car and go looking for her until sunrise. If I don't find her by then, I'll let Aaron know she's missing, wake up Romy, and we'll look in a different direction together. That way, I don't waste my time worrying, I can find Chell faster, and we can put this all behind us._

Around the side of the brick building, the focused man with eyes of titanium made his way to his pick-up truck. It was an ancient piece of machinery. The sides were paneled over with mismatched plates of two shades of grey, one slightly more of a rustic, rusted reddish tint. The engine was custom-built, of course, tailored for use on both on- and off-road terrain. All the windows had been replaced in order to meet current state regulations. As in no, you cannot have a truck that has no rear window and a non-tinted windshield. It wasn't the most elegantly refurbished and appealing of vehicles, but it ran smoothly and got Garret where he needed to be.

Right now, he needed to be looking for Chell.

The engine revved up and purred as the driver switched the ignition before shutting the door behind him. As Garret began pulling out of the drive next to the store, he began questioning his put-together plan.

 _Yep_ , he acknowledged while glancing briefly at the roof, _Romy's going to kill us both. Chell, for leaving, and me, for leaving her out of the search. Might as well start digging both our graves. I should_ _ **really**_ _start taking my own advice._

With that, he put the stick-shift into the DRIVE gear, put his foot on the gas pedal, and steered off into the dark canvas of ink-black sky.


	4. The Fool

_**Chapter 3- The Fool**_

 _ **Climbing the Tower**_

It had been hours.

Garret was exhausted, worn-out, frayed, bent backwards, and any other conventional terms to describe a man who had been driving up and down the countryside in the wee hours of the morning. Or was it last night? It was that weird time of the day where late at night blended into early morning. Either way, it had been hard to see where he was driving. It had become so bad that he was afraid that he would've crashed into a tree or ended up headfirst in that muddy watering hole on the other side of the forest.

This grogginess didn't help either. It was messing with his internal judgment and motor skills. Brain control was currently experiencing cutbacks because of the amount of electricity required to keep the human aware enough to see where he was going. It seemed the neurons just didn't have enough charge to work properly. Understandable, given the circumstances.

The human was leaning over the dashboard, one hand lazily draped over the steering wheel. The titanium shade of gray his eyes had been at the start of his journey had grinded into a cloud of grey sawdust, with just as much usefulness. He strangled the stick-shift into another gear as he came off the vegetation, the wear of the plastic in his worn skin giving him enough pain to stay aware. The truck lurched upward as it came into contact with asphalt.

He still hadn't had found Chell, which was what was really bumming him out. Worry was not a sensation Garret was used to. It drained him of most of his energy that he could be using for more useful things, and keeping that unnatural focus for so long had also taken its toll. He was also immensely frustrated that his search had been fruitless, despite his efforts. Which would make it even _worse_ when he would eventually have to explain himself to Romy. Not only had he _left_ her behind and lied to her face, but he had run himself ragged and risked an accident for _nothing_ **.**

He could almost hear her now: _Garret Rickey! I swear to Lord Almighty that you are the most impossible man I have ever met! What the heck were you thinking-running off by yourself exhausted as you are and as dark as it was out! And you didn't even bring me! I swear you are just as mule-headed as_ _ **she**_ _is- a real cheeky pair you two are-thinking a disappearing act a fiiiiine prank. I swear you two are going to kill me from a stress-induced heart attack!_

It was a scathing lecture he was not looking forward to, but knew it was coming, and coming loud.

But first he had to fight the oncoming tidal wave of unconsciousness that would certainly leave him flipped upside down in a wreckage of smoldering steel, or worse.

 _I'm not gonna make it all the way back at this rate,_ he thought as he weighed his options. _It would just be better to park near Fox and kick back. Or, I wonder if Otten will let me sleep in his barn? Long as I don't snore so loud I scare the hens I should be fine._

Pulling in beside Marten Otten's wire fence, he exited the pickup with the grace of a bear that had just gotten out of six months of hibernation and may have wanted to have a couple more weeks to snooze away. The sun was poison to his vision, blotting out most of his view in glaring yellowish-white streaks as it came up. The lenses in his eyes were slow to pick up the sudden shift in lighting, burning purple after-images that lingered as he made his way to the barn doors.

The sheep grazing in the fields nearby were having an entertaining time watching the human try to perform basic motor functions. It seemed that no one had told him that it was much easier to just walk on all fours like they did, in order to have better stability. Chewing steadily, their casually interested eyes followed their breakfast entertainment. Lambs excitedly peeked out from under wool of their parents, enraptured with the spectacle.

Garret finally reached the violet-speckled image of what he imagined were the doors. Their rusty joints squealed as he barreled them open with the last of his strength. Someone must have hit him with a tranquilizer then, because his muscles spontaneously then decided to release all of their tension, causing him to collapse on top of a hay bale conveniently placed in his wavering path.

 _So much for permission-_ is what he would have thought if he wasn't flopped-over dead weight by the time his eyes were seeing nothing but darkness.

[-]

" _Rickey…"_

" _Hey, Rickey…"_

" _Are you coming tonight? You said you would!"_

 _A playful shove._

" _Oh, come on. I know you're not really asleep. You always fake it if I want you to go somewhere."_

 _Another shove, more insistent and aggressive._

" _I see you smiling under that bush on your face! Come on, Aaron's going to kill us if we're late. He said he needed help setting up the tables."_

" _Garret!"_

" **Garret!"**

He woke up slowly despite the increasing volume of the voice above him. He pushed himself upward and tilted his face to the source, Mr. Otten himself, looking slightly annoyed but not cross. His thin, chestnut hair was plastered onto his head with sweat under a worn cap, a regular appearance for a man who worked in agriculture for a living. Mart was used to Garret sometimes passing out in strange places due to the young man pulling all-nighters on the tower that overshadowed his property.

"It's about time you came around. I've been calling your name for about ten minutes straight," he said as he outstretched his hand to help get Garret up into a sitting position, "I didn't even notice you conked out there until Heather said something around about lunch."

"Yeah, sorry about that Mr. Mart," Garret drowsily managed between yawns as he scratched the back of his head, "I was going to ask you first, but I just kind of decided to pass out as soon as I got here. Not very courteous of me, haven't really managed to get much sleep these past couple of days."

"I figured. Heather tried to get you up too, but you just kept on going like you had that African sleeping sickness," Mr. Otten responded to Garret's absent-minded apology while gathering some rope from the walls while balancing empty jugs under his arms. There had been no harm done. It wasn't the oddest place he had found Garret sleeping.

Noticing that his beard had decided to adopt camouflage by taking in individual straws, he plucked them out and brushed himself off of any excess debris. He turned to see the barn doors still open, the sun hanging low over the fields in a hazy crimson. The sleeper noticed that it was late sundown.

"Holy Newton, what time is it?"

"About six!" Mart shouted down from where he had climbed the ladder to the second level, accumulating more supplies as he went.

"Well that explains why my brain keeps bashing itself against my skull. Slept for about fourteen hours and I feel like I just got run over by a semi."

"Maybe you should get a more stable sleep schedule?" Mart said between a cord draped around his neck and a rake balanced underneath his arm. "It seems like every time I see you, you're either awake too long or asleep too long."

"No, I'll be fine. Some food and a few minutes of moving are all I need to get kicking." He gave a smile he hoped looked convincing as to the validity of his claim, but the truth was the pain had actually gotten worse.

Garret's current headache wasn't just a headache, it was a bulk can of pain on a buy-one-get-one-free sale. He was surprised Mr. Otten hadn't looked at him funny and politely remarked that his forehead was currently pulsating based on his estimate of the amount of throbbing he was feeling right behind his eyes.

Despite this, it seemed Mart was content with his response, as he had begun piling the supplies onto the back of an antique trailer.

"Fox acting up again?"

"Nah, not more than usual," said Garret with a slight sigh. He was getting ready to tell Mr. Otten farewell and return to town to regroup and launch a second search, but considered it a better idea to ask him for more information. "Actually-I was looking for Chell. See, she's kind of gone missing and no one's seen her for about a day and a half. She didn't tell anyone where she went either, so I decided to go look for her."

He frowned as he recalled the fruitless search that had led him roaming for hours behind the wheel. Sleep was dragging on the edges of his muscles, irritating his mood even further than his headache. He subconsciously gripped his hand into a fist, balling up his frustration and planning to use it as his ignition switch to set into action.

"Oh, Chell? They found her already."

"I'm going to go into town and try aga- wait, _what_ _ **?**_ " He turned sharply in Mart's direction, "what'd you just say?"

"They found her this morning. Some guy was carrying her in on his back into the middle of town. She didn't look too good either, I heard. Completely unconscious and looked near about dead. Lost a lot of blood. Doc says it was from a bullet wound in her hip," Mart leaned against the trailer as he recounted the day's events.

" _ **Shot?!**_ What the hell happened?" Garret asked, a bit too fast for brain control to register as a bit too harsh. He hadn't even realized he had never released his fists from their grip.

Mart put his hands up in a pacifying gesture as he responded, "Hey, look, I don't know. No need to get all worked up. I'm just relaying what I heard from the others and Ellie."

Immediately Garret felt a touch of shame come over him. It was not like him to just burst out in anger at someone for no reason, especially not Mart Otten. The man had pretty much allowed him to plant a permanent fixture on his private property with no monetary compensation, allowing multiple random people move heaps of outdated technology and rusty junk all over his yard, and working multiple days a week late into the night.

He took a deep breath and apologized," Sorry Mr. Mart, I've just been driving all night looking for her-I didn't, and I'm just now hearing this news. I feel like I just got out of a coma, and I'm just frustrated that I'm the last one to find this out."

"No worries. I'd probably be frustrated too, if I was in your position. Life keeps conspiring to make sure you're the last one in the loop."

 _Well if he says it's fine, then I guess I can just move on_ , Garret thought with a mental shrug, _Man, this week has just been the worst. Seems like life wants more than just to conspire against me, more like it wants me dead from exhaustion so it can collect my life insurance. Well, joke's on it, I'm not worth more than a sack full of dead rats. It would be better to collect_ their _life insurance._

Garret took this opportunity to see if Mr. Otten had heard any more information.

"What did Doc Vik say about her condition?"

"Well, I didn't speak to her myself," Mart recalled while leaning against one of the rafters," but Aaron said she was shot clean through the abdomen. No bullet found, just a wound that Doc had to stitch up. Apparently she was bleeding out really bad, had to get a large transfusion. I'll tell you what though, she must be made of Kevlar, cause he said as soon as she woke up she just walked out with that stranger and went home like nothing happened."

That wasn't a shock. Garret had seen Chell take flesh wounds that were at least two inches deep and shrug them off as if they were nothing. She was always wearing bandages as a preventative measure during her runs, muscles bound tight to bone. She almost never got sick, except for the usual bout of seasonal cold in winter. If someone had ever asked him to point out a living example of a human in pique physical health and condition, he would always point to Chell.

Nevertheless, she was still human, and the human body tended not to react well to a piece of metal going over sixty miles per hour being lodged into it. The usual reaction of the body would be to panic itself into shock, pump itself full of chemicals, and spill out blood all over itself. In worst cases, it would bleed _into_ itself. Speedy thing goes in; sometimes speedy thing did not come out.

Since there was no bullet found, Garret assessed that it had gone clear through. Chell was lucky it wasn't worse. The only risk she would run of a clear wound would be of bleeding out. Then again, according to Mr. Otten she _had_ almost bled out and had had to be carried back to town.

"Wait a minute-stranger?" Garret asked in a puzzled tone," You sure it wasn't somebody from around here?"

"Nope, never seen him before," Mart answered, "I can't say anyone else knows him, the way everybody was staring at him as he came in, carrying her over his shoulders like a sack of potatoes. He was looking around as if everybody was gonna stone him or something. Really nervous in general. Kept asking if there was a 'repair associate' around, whatever that meant. I _think_ he meant a doctor. But who knows? I couldn't understand half of the words coming out of his mouth because he was chattering so fast."

"Well, whoever he is, I think I owe him my thanks, considering he did bring her home," Garret mused mostly to himself, but still within earshot.

Mart responded in kind, "Well, he sure wasn't hard to miss. He was at least a full head taller than most of everybody I saw around-glasses, kind of lanky, blonde, blue eyes, white collared shirt and I think he was wearing a tie."

"A _tie_? What was he doing-starring a documentary or something?" Garret snorted.

"No, it looked like a uniform. He might have come from the city. That's the only place I can think of that might have people still wearing them."

Ties had fallen out of fashion in at least the last fifty years, starting around the time when the Resistance started gaining ground after the Invasion. There was nothing very practical about a long piece of cloth dangling very close to your windpipe when you were trying to survive in a world overrun by extradimensional horrors and the wanton destruction they left in their wake. One second you could be running for your life, a piece of the roof falls near you, you barely dodge, but that slip of cloth is caught under the rubble. At that point you were as good as living bait for the whoever- _what_ ever that currently disagreed with you on the subject of you living. Or else, one good fall, that tie gets wrapped around something, and you were saying hello to the last guy who tried his luck.

Due to this reason, most ties seen nowadays were either worn by actors doing a pre-Combine period piece or worn by elderly men who were too stubborn to let the fashion die out. In Garret's humble opinion, ties were stupid. Especially for someone of his profession, where loose articles of clothing getting stuck in machinery just wasn't a risk anyone could take. If a guy needed to look fancy, why couldn't he just wear the collared shirt by itself, or suspenders, or even a suit coat with slacks? There were plenty of more practical choices for professional wear.

 _So why in the world would anyone wear one unironically? Even most business people don't wear them nowadays,_ Garret thought with confusion.

The more he thought about it, the more it just seemed… _odd_. His best friend suddenly disappears and then is seen again bleeding to death on the back of a stranger who had a decades-old fashion sense. It just didn't sit right. And for some reason, the young man had a suspicion things were only about to get stranger.

He shook his head. _Why am I so fixated on ties? They're impractical, they're outdated, end of story._ Garret berated his distracted train of thought as he came to notice that Mr. Otten had continued to speak, not noticing his inattentiveness as he was facing towards the barn doors.

"…seems we get enough commotion around here with that fox messing with the chickens and your endeavors. Now Ellie's too afraid to stay anywhere far away from me or Heather because of that man. She was the first one to spot him. For some reason, she's dead set convinced he's some kind of monster. I think it may be because she's just never seen a person that tall before-I mean I think he's even taller than- "

 _-Whump-_

" _Daddy!"_ squeaked a voice between Mr. Otten's legs. It belonged to a tiny creature wearing bright red rain boots whose hands gripped onto his jeans, face upturned and eyes wide with fear. "Is it true? Is the monster still here? Linnell says he is."

"Well, speak of the little munchkin- how are you doing, Ellie?" Garret chuckled a bit as he parted his beard in a warm smile.

"Oh, umm… hi, Mr. Garret Rickey…" the little girl looked towards him, the rainbow-assorted clips in her blonde hair jangling against each other as she did. "I'm okay…"

She turned her attention back to her father, "Well, _is_ he, Daddy?"

Mart sighed, "Honey, Mommy and I told you, there is no monster. He's just a stranger who happens to be visiting from out of town. There's nothing to be scared of."

"Mmmm", Ellie bit her lip slightly in trepidation, trying to take her father's words and use them to shield her from her fears. She looked down at what was in her hand, a small, rough-knit stuffed vortigaunt whom she had named Linnell and never left behind no matter where she went. She silently asked her companion for advice and listened intently.

The little girl stayed silent for a moment, then spoke again, "Linnell says the monster's not here right now, so I guess I'm not so scared. But he _was_ here. I don't think I like that. But it's okay. I'll be okay as long as Linnell, Mommy, and Daddy are with me," she smiled slightly as she said this. "Oh! And Mr. Garret Rickey, too. Right, Mr. Rickey?"

If his facial hair wasn't so thick, you could have probably seen Garret's face turn red with embarrassment as the little girl looked up at him with expectant, glittery eyes. For some reason, she always had a great admiration of him, like he deserved some shiny golden key for saving the city of Dangersopolis from the weekly machinations of Dr. Mayhem every Saturday morning. He supposed it may have had to do with his physique-giving off that air that he could kick butt and take names whenever the time called for it. What Garret didn't know was that she regularly watched him climb Foxglove, which in her mind interpreted to superhuman strength.

It was cute-if a bit hammy, how she seemed to look up to him that way. It was also probably the reason he was the only one she called by both first and last name. Her unusual way of showing respect.

It was a child's fantasy, one that Garret didn't have the heart to break. Especially with the look she was giving him now, eyes full of stars ready to burst into supernovas of glittery happiness.

"I think your Daddy is right on this one, little missy," he responded, "I haven't seen any monsters roaming around."

"But-um…. If there are, you'll scare them away! Right?"

"Little missy, I promise that I would do everything physically possible to make sure that no harm came to ya," Garret said sincerely.

"Like punch the monsters in the face?"

He laughed," I don't know if it'll come to that. I could probably just restrain most monsters, or people, climbing on Fox gives me quite a workout. But, yeah, I'll punch them in the face if I have to. Although I'm sure your daddy could probably scare off any monsters just with that face of his before they got even twelve miles within this place. So don't you worry, alright, Ellie?"

"Okay, I'll try," she resolved while lifting her head in an exaggerated proud expression. She grasped Linnell and started to march off before getting a confused expression, did a double-take, and came back. Her stance shrunk two inches.

"Um…Mr. Garret Rickey," she hesitated, "what does _reh-straeen_ mean?"

Before he could answer, her dad started laughing at her sudden change in tone and responded for him, "It means he'll get on top of someone and won't let them move. Kind of like this!" He picked her up and started tickling her stomach, causing her to burst into giggling fits.

" _Daddy,_ stop! Stop it!" Ellie protested as her father continued. He let up and allowed her to breathe.

"You don't worry, honey," he said to reassure her, "You let your mommy and me worry about things, okay? It's okay to be afraid, as long as you remember that you don't let it control you. You've got to keep your head up and face the things that make you scared. That's what makes you brave. Can you do that for me? Can you be brave?"

"Okay, Daddy. I'll try," she said quietly, "Linnell says she'll try, too."

Garret looked on at this exchange between them. It seemed so insignificant in the grander scheme of the working world, this conversation. But, Garret knew that this moment would probably be one that Ellie wouldn't forget as she grew up. Moments like this, where life lessons were passed from parent to child, built up over time. She would remember the mellow timbre of her dad's voice, the calming smile, and the love that clearly shone from his eyes. He watched him give her a proud smile.

"That's my girl."

Mr. Otten kissed her on the forehead. After he set his daughter down, Mart closed up the truck trailer and turned his attention to Garret.

"Well, whatever happens, it sure does keep things interesting around here, doesn't it?"

" _Interesting", that's one word for it_ , he thought to himself.

Unfortunately for Garret, things were about to get more interesting.

" _ **GARRET RICKEY!"**_ the voice roared as it shook the timbers of the barn's frame. The young man's spine riled in shock as his nerves went on end.

 _Crap_ , was all his brain could think of to designate as a response.

That wave of unrestrained, dramatic anger could only come from one source. Garret had stayed too long, and was about to come face first with the tidal wave that was the wrath of Romy Hatfield.

 _I'm not getting out of this one am I?_

He sheepishly turned to face her and stammered, "Oh, _hi_ Romy. How's it going? I was just talking to Mr. Mart here about all the interesting things happening lately. Like Chell. Turns out she's back. And okay! Besides maybe a bit of a gunshot wound and internal bleeding. But other than that, she's fine!"

His voice disappeared as soon as he saw her face. It was red-shaded and twitching ever-so-slightly in a poor attempt to restrain the rage of a woman with a fuse the length of his remaining days alive. Maybe, he could sway her rage by distracting her with more details.

"And-"

"I _know_ ," she interrupted by narrowing her eyes. Either it was a sudden draft coming from the loft upstairs or just the coldness in her face that made Garret shake. It was moments like these that reminded him of how similar Romy and Chell were about dealing with other people. Whereas Chell was like this all the time, Romy usually was much friendlier and outgoing. But when she _was_ like this, there was no negotiation, no escape. The contrast was not lost on him.

Her countenance calmed a bit as she turned to Mr. Martin. "Hello Mart, nice to see you today, she started while smiling, "I'm sorry about dropping in uninvited like this, but I have a few _issues_ which need to be addressed. I hope the weather is treating you right today, I've been sweating bullets just from walking outside in this heat. Now, if you'll excuse me, Garret and I are going to have a little _chat_ _ **.**_ "

"Ow, _hey!_ "

Ellie looked at them, puzzled at what was transpiring before her and asked her father for clarification, "Daddy, why is Miss Romy pulling Mr. Garret Rickey's ear?"

"I think Mr. Garret Rickey is in trouble," he answered while trying to hide his huge smirk, "Romy's about to put him in for a little time-out."

"Oh."

It was quite a sight, seeing a woman who was barely over five feet tall dragging a grown man behind her. Especially since that man could physically pick this woman up if he truly needed to. Mr. Otten was thoroughly entertained.

"Mart, come on, don't la- _ **OUCH-**_ _Ok!_ Okay! Geez, I'm coming, don't rip it off!"

Garret's pained expression-all squinted eyes and gaping open mouth like he was about to eat his own beard-was the final blow in the Otten family's defenses. Both father and daughter bursted out into hearty laughter as Romy practically hauled Garret off with _Aggh's_ and _OUCH's_ following them as they went across town.

[-]

"What, the, ever, loving _, HELL_ **!** I mean seriously, Garret! What is your problem? I mean-really-what is your clinically diagnosed disease? Do you just get a kick out of **lying** to people? Do you enjoy seeing how much crap you can get away with?! You just spend all damn day on that tower thinking of all your excuses you give to people when you just decide to run off by yourself not telling anyone where you're going? 'Oh, look at me I'm Garret Rickey. I'm so big and tough. I don't need anyone to help me do anything.' You said we would look for Chell together. But, NO! You just think it's decent courtesy to skip town, nearly drive yourself into a tree, and leave your friends behind! I swear this is the last time I ever blindly trust you with anything. You just couldn't wait a few hours, _like you said we would_ , so that we could go look together! So, let me ask again, what kind of brain damage or hemorrhage do you have that makes you think that going off by yourself in the middle of the night to search for someone who just _did the same thing_ is ever a plausible solution?! Huh? Answer me, clever man. _I'm waiting."_

Yep, this was going exactly as he had expected. Actually, it was going far worse.

Romy had essentially made a spectacle of them both by refusing to let go of his ear all the way to her house where they could have their little _chat_. He was pretty sure there had been plenty of people watching because he swore he had heard plenty of snickers underneath his sounds of pain. If Aaron had been watching, he wouldn't be able to live it down for at _least_ the next six months.

She had ordered Max and Jason to take Duke outside and go play in their "fortress" (really just a small shed) and sat Garret down at their dining room table without missing a beat. She had at least given him the courtesy of not cursing him out in front of other people. So here he was, patiently accepting the ten-minute lecture being given to him on how terrible of a friend he was. He was used to listening to angry rants anyway, deserved or not.

He knew he deserved this one though.

" _Still_ waiting," she interrupted his train of thought.

He looked her directly in the eye and responded, "I have no excuse. I should have taken you with me in the first place. I'm sorry." He hoped his tone of voice was sincere.

"That's it? No trace of sarcasm, no witty remark?" she questioned. She was testing him.

"No, I know when I screw up and I know when I need to put myself in my place. I broke your trust and I made you more worried than you needed to be. You're right, it wasn't a good idea to go off by myself. I really am sorry," Garret conveyed what he hoped was honesty by keeping his apology to-the-point.

She looked skeptical for a second before eyeing him. Her shoulders dropped in a sign of acceptance.

"You damn better well be," she sighed, "I just don't know what to do with you two sometimes. First, her. Then, you. Garret-I can't take it when people up and off the face of the Earth like that. I expected I would have to lay into her for this, but _you?_ "

Her question ended her thought for her.

This time she looked _him_ in the eye as she elaborated, "Garret, I know you and I don't exactly get each other. Especially me. I don't understand why you spend all of your free time hanging twenty feet off the ground like a hyperactive orangutan swinging up there on those cables. And I would understand why you don't get the fact that _The Gorgeous and the Breathless_ has been my obsession for the past three seasons. My point is, just because I don't understand half the things you do, doesn't mean I don't worry about you. It just doesn't do well for somebody's health when their friends leave like that."

"You're right, I don't get why you like that show," Garret said as he put on a mock face of confusion, "The acting's so fake I can practically hear the director shouting orders over their lines."

"Well, that lack of wisecracks didn't last long. What was that without one, fifteen seconds? Ten?"

"I apologize again. Force of habit," he remarked.

"Okay. That one wasn't sincere and you know it."

"Still better than those so-called 'actors'."

"At least those actors know how to listen to people giving them good directions, unlike you," she chastised. Her eyes were rolled upwards with forehead slightly lowered while staring up at him.

Garret interpreted this as a sign of grating annoyance rather than anger. At least she had calmed down and was no longer liable to physically assault him. Not that he didn't deserve it, mind.

"Well, my directions may not be good, but they get me going places," he responded, "and when I get there, I'll be sure to keep you in mind. And the rest of town, for that matter."

"With the way you go, you'd think you'd have her finished by now," she scolded, arms folded over her chest, "seems to me you've hit another snag in that world's biggest tower of steel wool."

He snickered back, "I thought you would have a little more faith in me Romy. Steel wool? That's low!"

"Someone around here has to keep you grounded. Literally and figuratively. I mean, really? Foxglove? Who names a _radio tower_ after a flower? If I turn around, next thing you'll be doing is marrying it!"

"Hey-I have my reasons. Didn't you have a reason to name your dog or your boys?"

"Jason and Max, yes. Duke we just named after the sign near that old insurance place we found him near when he was a puppy," she said.

"I remember that day! The boys were so small they kept getting dragged off by him because he was so excited to meet everybody. Max faceplanted about ten times before he finally gave up on walking him!" Garret recounted while laughing uproariously, Romy joining him.

" _Hahaha_ ha!" she snorted in the middle of her laugh, "he kept pouting the whole evening, let me tell you! He kept blowing out his cheeks, looked like a pufferfish!"

She laughed again and said, "I'm just glad Duke managed to win him over in the end. Him and his brother. Now I can't tear them apart even if I tried."

Garret looked outside the window. Duke was currently trying to play goalie for both sides of an impromptu soccer match between the boys. They were bobbing and weaving around him in their own chaotic jubilee, smiling brightly and struggling for breath between their laughter and their activity.

It reminded Garret of when he was a kid, sun in his face, without a care in the world.

When he first came to this town, it was quite a bit smaller, with the population only reaching a maximum of about sixty to seventy-five individuals. In Eaden, every body quite literally mattered. The children had sparse choices when it came to playmates other than each other, so most of the children of his generation were at least acquainted.

Garret would spend his time doing some of things the twins did: improvised athletic games involving a ball of some sort, roughhousing with the neighbors' pets, playing innocent tricks on the adults, watching archives of pre-war movies. Especially the science fiction ones. He couldn't get enough of those.

The classics like _Journey to the Center of the Earth, Back to the Future, 2001: A Space Odyssey_ ….and those were just the popular ones everyone had heard of. He could remember sitting in the town hall common room after school, sitting for hours on end just being absorbed. You could be discovering new life, or traveling the stars, or heck, having an existential crisis because you made your own mother hit on you instead of your dad. It just all seemed to be too tempting to ignore.

The new movies just didn't have the same appeal. They had to play to certain... _sensibilities_. Production companies had to play it safe when it came to what was acceptable in a plot's narrative; to try to stay away from any events resembling history's horrors. Some didn't even do any sci fi at all. It was just all too _safe_ , in Garret's opinion.

Pushing the limits of known convention. Breaking the rules of what was possible. This was Science.

And then it had happened. Science had broken the rules so much, that it had ripped holes in dimensional space asunder. It had taken the lid of Pandora's box, opened it, let the extraterrestrial horrors loose, smashed the box to pieces, and buried hope in burning, smoldering ash. The Combine had stolen everything from humanity: freedom, marriage, livelihood, home, family.

But the most important thing they had taken was children. For a time, children did not exist for almost two decades because of barriers put in place that made all healthy adults sterile. An insurance policy, a way to keep their subjects reminded of who held their future.

That's why people nowadays were just that little bit extra careful, a little bit protective. That was especially true for Romy and Aaron, Romy because of her tough-love motherly attitude, and Aaron because he treated everyone in town as his own.

Not all places were like Eaden. As boring as it could be sometimes, this town was safe. It was home. For most people, that was enough.

Garret wasn't most people.

"Garret, are you alright? You spaced out there," Romy asked.

He dragged himself out of his reverie. "Yeah, just thinking back to when I was a kid," he said, "these kids don't know how lucky they have it. They don't have to deal with things like faulty wires, or shorted A/C converters, or having to reconfigure ten receivers because one fell slightly 0.12 radians out of place. Or worse, taxes."

"Even Nowhere, Michigan can't hide from a federal tax collector," she agreed, "Oh don't you worry about that. They'll learn how the world is eventually. Being a grown-up _sucks_. Who do you think has to teach them that?"

"Well, whoever it is I hope she just remembers the most important thing."

She eyed him and asked, "And what is _that_ , Garret?"

"To teach 'em how to duck."

" _ **OW!**_ _Jason, what the he-"_

" _Max._ If you finish that sentence I'll personally show you what it's like to _be there_."

"Y- _Ye_ s-ma'am."

"Come inside and let me have a look."

It was alarming how fast Romy had gotten the front door open from the time that Max had gotten hit square in the face by the rogue soccer ball bouncing off the shed and knocking him to the ground.

 _Jason doesn't know his own strength,_ Garret smirked to himself, _probably might need to look before he kicks._

His mother was currently raking through his brother's hair looking for any signs of injury. Jason was standing stock-still beside them.

"Ow- **ow-ow**! Stop touching there it _hurts!_ "

"I'm sure it's not that bad. Quit moving-I'm trying to see," Romy snipped at him as he was pulling away from her. "Yep, as I thought. Just a bruise. Jason, go get some ice for your brother."

"Ok."

Garret finally saw his opportunity. It seemed Romy had forgiven him and all was water under the bridge, so he took this chance to leave.

"Well, I'll see you around Romy," he said as he shouldered past Duke in the front doorway.

"Alright, goodbye," she responded while intently looking over the rest of her son's head.

She looked up. "Oh, and Garret?"

"Yes?"

"I'm not forgetting this little conversation we've had. I mean it. I will find you."

Her green-brown eyes were pinning him against the door frame. This was not a statement. It was a warning. Her stare reminded him of someone else who could be just as stubborn and intense.

He swallowed. "Noted."

[-]

"Gary? Gary Rickey!? Dang man, where ya been? Half the town tells me you was dead!"

"Garret-and that was Chell who was shot, not me."

Eaden General attracted quite a bit of attention from visitors. It was the only place that sold basic amenities and its height made it the pivotal center of town. Granted, most of those visitors were delivery personnel sent to bring much needed supplies, mostly from Depot.

Aaron usually dealt with the traders, vendors, and couriers, but Garret had managed to slip in behind the old man's back in time for this one. A liquor shipment that came in roughly about every two-to-three weeks was here from a bar, named the Twisted Strider, he frequented on his Depot visits, and usually it was sold out before he could get to it. Not this time.

"Oh, that's that lady friend of yours, yeah? Shot, huh? Never pegged her fo' somebody with enemies. Then'gan you can never tell which people gettin' messed with in the wrong crowd. I know I sure did, lotta times."

"That's because you don't bother to pay attention, Russell," Garret replied, "like that time you let in that guy carrying that bundle with the tarp."

"How was I suppos'ta know it was a _crowbar_ underneath there! "Russell absconded Garret's accusation with an air of defiance, "You think I know when summa these folks wanna kill each other over some backstabbin' chick they met while they was drunk? Huh, Garfield? Imma tell you that guy sure did know how to swing it, though. He was all _cling-clang_ and _swoosh-bam-bang_ 'n all the booths and everythin'. Almost took out half the left side o' my teeth. But it got done! I took care of it!"

"What teeth? Do you even still have any? I think he would've been doing you a favor-make you match. And it's Garret."

"Right, sorry-hey! I'm only missin' one of my right back-teeth and one front-tooth, thank you very much!"

The subject of mockery gave a sideways smile and opened his jaw to show the engineer his evidence.

Garret huffed, " _Only_ lost two teeth, huh? Ever thought of getting fillings?"

"Nah, can't afford it. I gotta get me a place o' my own first. Y'know, getta sense of stability."

"How long's that gonna take?"

"Longer than I wan'it. Bossman cutta piece of my salary to pay fo' Mister Crowbar's property damage. Guess I shoulda been more watchful, 'steada hangin' round with you."

"Don't pin this on me now. It's not my fault if you get distracted-aren't you supposed to keep undesirables like that _out_?" Garret said, jokingly.

"Ok, _fine_. You win."

"What's my prize?"

"First pick o' the load, got summa the good stuff this time."

Russell thumbed back past his shoulder to some open wooden crates sitting next to the back entrance. They were filled with various glass bottles containing liquor, beer, wine, and some hard fruit drinks that some of the older ladies couldn't get enough of.

Garret made his way to peruse the selection and see if he was feeling a bit adventurous with his choices. A yellow-tinged bottle of a particularly rare rum caught his interest, one that had come from Venezuela, how he couldn't guess.

"Venezuela, huh?" remarked Russell, who was reading the label from over his shoulder, "knew a guy from there when I was out in Colorado workin' fo'a lumber yard. Bit of a quiet man, but a hard worker. Always treated me decent, anyway. I've wanted to see if I could visit that city and see 'im cause he went back. Save up to take a vacation there."

"Sherwood, please think about that last sentence."

"What, a vacation?" he responded to Garret's request confused.

"No, before that."

"Colorado?"

"Closer, but no."

"That bottle of brandy?" Russell asked with one eyebrow raised in genuine confusion.

"Nevermind-and this is light rum," Garret explained while turning the bottle over slowly in his hands, "see the rest of the label? Plus the color's too dark."

"Really? Shoot, I can't tell the difference. Don't drink. Deadens the mind and the reflexes," Russell said and shrugged, leaning against one of the crates and taking out a pocket knife out of the pockets of his coat. He pushed a button on its side and its blade revolved out in one swipe. Its blue-tinted metal reflected the light coming off overhead highlighting a unicorn engraved on one side, a pegasus on the other. He turned it side-to-side, following the light spot as it rushed around the walls.

Garret hadn't known Russell for long or very well, but he knew from first glance that he had been involved in some close encounters. His tanned skin was covered in discolored patches and deep-set lines, scar tissue grown over from long-gone wounds. One scar ran straight down from his left eyebrow to the middle of his cheek, a dark mark that ran over his eyelid. His eyes were a golden-amber, striking against rustic skin and chestnut hair. Sinewy muscles were coiled around a scrawny collarbone visible past his T-shirt and that raggedy, long coat.

Russell Sherwood wasn't usually seen in Eaden because he worked at The Twisted Strider as a bouncer. Usually the owner came himself to deliver, but he had been called out to business in New Detroit for about a month, so Russell had been assigned the task. This confused Garret because Russell was from the area, judging by his accent. He thought a native would have been better to send there, but this was the second time Russell had made the delivery.

Perhaps it was a test. Russell hadn't been working there as long as Jackie, the bartender, and he wanted to see how the new guy held up responsibility when the boss was away. He had been doing fine so far, but Garret wondered if he could keep it up.

"I'd appreciate it if you could please keep your blade in your pocket, Mr. Sherwood," sounded a voice front the front of the store," it may be close to closing but children are still present in this building."

"Sorry Mr. Harrison, didn't mean anythin' by it," Russell pocketed the blade as he answered.

"Halifax."

"What?"

"His name is Aaron Halifax."

"Oh, dang! Sorry, sir-," he looked down in embarrassment after Garret's correction,"-Mr. Har- _ **Hal**_ _ifax_ -um..all of the load you asked fo's right here and everythin'. I think? Lemme double check."

He rushed outside the back door to a pickup truck not unlike his own waiting outside. There were more crates that had their lids removed but not unpacked. Garret observed that they were correctly individually separated by diagonal wooden blocks to keep the bottles from clanking into each other. The first time Russell came, about a third of the bottles had been cracked and had to be replaced. That had been the biggest blow to his savings ever since the incident with Mr. Crowbar.

Russell was acting a bit nervous, which wasn't a good sign. It had been obvious that the replacement for all of those wares had affected him and had to be done behind his employer's back no less. It always seemed to be two steps forward one step back into Hollywood's inaccurate depiction of quicksand.

"He seems to be a bit out of sorts," Aaron mused while watching him.

Garret nodded his head in agreement, "Russell's just trying to be careful. I know Jackie must have given him an earful for all that broken merchandise. It's not easy to keep things hidden from a man as observant as Mr. Ruskin."

"Well I hope it works out for him, even if he does have kind of a sketchy demeanor. He's got scar's I've seen that rival old Lars's."

"I doubt he got any of those in the War," Garret responded, "if he did, he needs to tell me where he managed to biologically reverse his physical age by fifty years."

"I don't know if I would take some of that. I've gotten used to being ancient," Aaron grabbed a piece of paper off the counter that had been neatly placed in front of the register. He scanned its contents before placing it with a thumbtack on a corkboard on the wall. He slipped into the back rooms.

Garret briefly looked to where it had been placed. It was a supplies list with sections dedicated to clothing, groceries, and miscellaneous items. Every item was listed in alphabetical order with some items written in red ink. What caught his attention was the handwriting. It was clear and concise, like Chell's, but flowed across the page. Letters swirled with loops that could have just as easily been seen in an eighteenth century business manuscript as it could a modern shopping list. The lettering spoke of sophistication and an educated, artistic background. It was too familiar.

Garret felt tired. "I'm heading up."

Aaron poked his head out from the dusty shelves and called," Already? I thought you got enough shuteye in the Ottens' barn."

"Ahah, yeah, sure. I just want to turn in early today, so I can get up and make up for lost time."

"Alright, good night then, sweet prince."

Suddenly, a loud shout could be heard from outside.

" _Damn it!_ "

Aaron moved to the source and hollered back, "What seems to be the problem Mr. Sherwood?"

"The brandy! Jackie told me like fitty times 'Don't forget the brandy, you know's how they're gonna want it and you're gonna have to drive back.' And guess what? I hafta drive back!"

"Didn't he give you a written list of some kind?"

"Yeah."

"Well, what does it say?"

"I can't check. It was layin' on top of the brandy. _Argh!"_

He punched the side of one of the crates in frustration.

" _Argh-owowwoow.."_ and managed to get some splinters caught in his fingers.

Garret looked towards Aaron with a slight grin. Aaron replied with a shrug and went to try and share his earthly wisdom with a young man who was in dire need of it.

 _Good luck_ , Garret thought and pushed any unwanted thoughts out of his mind as he made his way upstairs.

[-]

Now that Garret had finally gotten into a relatively normal sleep cycle since yesterday he was feeling quite refreshed.

He had finished his to-do list early, Aaron was running the store by himself because the foot traffic wasn't too bad, and he had no repairs scheduled for the day. Therefore, he had spent most of the morning climbing on Fox installing the new relay system.

Currently dressed in a different pair of overalls, a toolbelt, and climbing cables, he looked like he had just stepped off the cover of an old hardware magazine. The cables that snaked into the loops of the belt gave him the appearance of being manipulated by a skilled puppeteer moving him in between the rods and beams. His innate knowledge of the tower's structure allowed him to maneuver around them quickly.

The tower cast a looming shadow in the midday sun, obscuring it from his view when he looked up. Rays highlighted the sturdy and chaotic jungle-gym of tangled rainbow wires in all directions. Satellite dishes were packed in every place Garret could have fit them. They all varied in size, make, model, and color. Some were pointing off to the left, upwards, twisted frontways, backways, and any other ways that he could physically "convince" them to move. Giant hooves bolted into the ground provided support. The rusty-colored metal clashed with the steel of the bolts holding it together. If the generator had been turned on, the whole structure would have hummed at an incessant, unhurried pulse, making the plating and bolts sing a low hymn.

To any passersby, it might have looked like a strange modern art sculpture that just so happens to also transmit radio waves. She even had her name painted in bleeding orange letters of spray-paint on one of her support legs.

 **FOXGLOVE**

It was obvious this tower had been a labor of love. But then again, love hurt, and sometimes Garret had to make major adjustments to get any response from her.

His face was obscured by a welding mask, a torch in his right hand. The relay system was being welded to the inside of the upper railings so that the dishes attached would be strengthened. Normally, Garret would listen to music while working, but the inner mechanisms of this relay were too finicky for mistakes. He had to give it his full focus. The only sound he heard was the roar of the gas-fed flames against searing metal.

A side-portion of his brain subconsciously registered a murmuring noise from far below. It was bouncing all over the place, sometimes lowering into a hushed shout and at others raising into a high-pitched whining tone. And frankly, it seemed quite annoyed with itself. It seemed to be someone speaking but it was hard to tell over the flame.

Garret finished the weld he was on and turned the gas off. The sound turned out to be someone speaking quite rapidly below him. At such a height, he couldn't see many details of this person, but he could see that it was a man, blonde hair, had glasses, and was wearing a bright blue tie that was in horrible need of a steam iron.

 _Wait. A_ _ **tie**_ _?_ Garret thought. Now he was intrigued.

He loosened the cable to drop down a good five feet. His boots met one of the main legs attached to the steel hooves and he clicked the cable into a horizontal girder. Leaning outward, he craned his neck to get a better look. The man was kicking at the dirt, continuing to mutter to himself in his flighty speech. There was something else that was off about his voice, but Garret couldn't hear him very well.

The man looked up and was suddenly gaping his mouth wide open. He started still for a moment, and then loudly proclaimed, "Oh, _what?_ What's one of _those?_ "

Garret then knew what was off about his voice. He was _British_.

Garret had met plenty of people from other parts of the country (what was left of it) through visiting relatives of the residents. Most of those people were from out west or further to the east coast. Romy herself sometimes sounded like she had come from the Georgia area. Depot also had folks from all walks of life, some even descended from people relocated from other nations by the Combine. However, Garret had never heard of anyone British except over the radio and television.

Maybe Mart was right, _interesting_ was certainly the word of the town right now.

The stranger had turned his attention to the lettering, reading it as his scrunched face moved up its length.

"EV…OLG…XOF," he read, "Evolgxof?" He blinked at the letters and stared at them with blank confusion.

 _Guess it's my turn to cut in_ , Garret thought as he put on a cheerful disposition and corrected him.

"Foxglove."

"Ohh, right," the guy said while twisting his neck in Garret's general direction, "Oh, that makes much more sense, that does. Foxglove. I- _aah!_ "

He startled as he finally realized that he had been spoken to.

" _Who-_ oh, there you are, up there! Had me worried for a second there. Hallo!"

"Hi," Garret replied in turn, raising the mask off his face and waving his torch in a friendly greeting. "You must be the guy Mart Otten was talking about. How's Chell?"

His face scrunched up in discomfort at the mention of her name. It seems all that muttering had something to do with her, judging from the immediate reaction.

"Fine, fine," he responded in a raised voice, "-she's fine, er, got of a' bit of a hole in her, long story, but you know, got it stitched up with a bit of string, no harm done! Well, harm _done_ , obviously, but not actual, lasting damage, is what I mean. Physically. No lasting physical damage done."

Garret's brain was currently complaining to him about having to work overtime.

"Glad to hear it….I think."

This guy was a bit of a talker, Garret noticed. His speech came out alternating between long tangents and short, clipped fragments. There was no order to it at all, either. It just came as an incessant flood of words that overstimulated his language center with pure data. Filtering it out for coherence was taking quite a bit of mental energy, which was slightly annoying but not unmanageable. It took him a moment just to process and come up with a response. All he could do was scratch the back of his head.

This was getting awkward.

He decided this would be a good time to introduce himself. He smiled broadly.

"Garret Rickey."

Another awkward pause.

"What?" the stranger asked. It took him a moment.

"Oh! Right, that's your _name_. Did not know what you were on about there," he said while leaning back against one of the support poles. "Wheatley, by the way. _My_ name, I mean. Interesting sort of contraption, this, isn't it? Very… _advanced_ -looking. Very Sciencey. I know a fair amount about this sort of thing, you see, quite knowledgeable about, um, machines, machinery, computers… your own work, is it?"

 _Mostly_ , Garret thought to himself, _but there's no way I could have done this by myself._ He thought of his dear, stubborn friend.

"Well, she's kind of everyone's," Garret said and resolved as an appropriate response, "we've been working on her for 'bout three years now, all told." He put the welder away in a custom holster and patted one of the upper rungs in an affectionate manner.

"Three years? Blimey. What took that long? I mean- I'm not being rude or anything, it's very impressive, but, er…"

He looked lost again. Garret picked up the conversation.

"Soon as I get her working, you'll find out," he replied while grinning, "she's going to put Eaden on the map."

The stranger, ( _Wheatley_ Garret reprimanded himself), was cocking his head up skyward and nodding absently as he said, "Oh, it draws maps as well, does it? Funny, because to me, it looked more like some sort of communications set-up, what with all things all over it and everything, and the big antenna on top. Fine, though, I can see now, obviously- maps happen to be something else I am a bit of a legend at, by the way. Reading maps, following maps, that whole area of map comprehension and interpretation is my particular speciality within the… map sciences."

Garret nodded along with him, leaning back in a _you're-full-of-it_ kind of way. Well, Garret could be full of it, too. He told brain control to put a smile on his face that continued to show friendliness, but to put something else into it.

Time for some fun.

"That so? Well, it's great to get to talk to someone who knows as much as I do about the technical side of a job like this."

"Yes I-"

"Between you and me, most folk around here are pretty handy with a hammer, but when it comes to how to spot-weld an RSJ or splice your basic belkin-batch cable, you might as well be speaking flux-shift for all they know 'bout it."

"Er-"

"Most of them wouldn't know the difference between an in-line LNB signal amp and a tri-ax optical MDU."

"Right-cause what sort of moron wouldn't know that?" Wheatley finished while laughing nervously.

He was slumping his neck into his shoulders even more so than when he was initially, and his eyes seemed to want to argue with each other about which direction they should face. Garret could tell he was a little bit overwhelmed by what friends would call his "nerd mode", most people were. Those were the times when he didn't hold back on how much of a complete obsessed fanboy he was for anything and everything machines.

This was usually the time where people asked him to speak their language or demanded to explain, but it seemed Wheatley was content to continue pretending knowing what he was talking about.

As Garret clipped off to a lower height, he finally got to get a better look at him. He was wearing a white-collared, button down shirt with yes, a tie, and black slack pants. The limbs that went through them were lanky, bony, and looked like someone had just stuck two sticks onto a snowman thinking that they were acceptable replacements for arms. His haystack of hair was perpetually both sticking to his forehead and trying to fly off his scalp. Facial features were cartoonishly proportioned with a mouth that took up almost half his face.

His eyes were the most striking thing about him: deep, goggly cavities behind bottle-thick glasses. They were a stratosphere blue that was intense and vivid. You might just get blinded if you stared at them too long. Not that you would get the chance. They were currently darting in all directions inside their sockets, threatening to roll out and come up snake-eyes.

"By the way," Garret said while looping around wires he had gathered, "I better get these hooked up before I fit the rest of the panel back on. Can you pass me a three-eighths crimper? Should be in the tool-box there- looks we might be able to reach, if I lean back some."

His tool-box contained all the instruments he had collected that even remotely related to machinery. It followed the same madman methodology as his living space. Drawers were stuffed to the brim.

"Oh," Wheatley muttered, "That's quite intense."

"Umm, absolutely! Not a problem!"

Garret tried his best to ignore the ramshackle rummaging that was going on below him and resumed, "She's mostly scrap of course. Stuff from Aaron's stockroom- you met Aaron?"

"Err, twice! Briefly. Here ya go!"

"Thanks, but those are slip-joint pliers." Third drawer from the top, second from the left of an alternating position between a pair of vise-grip pliers and an adjustable spanner wrench. Yes, he had that memorized.

"Oh. Well, er, easy mistake to make, think you'll find, they do look very similar, slip-joint pliers and… and what you said the first time- give me a moment-"

Some more rummaging.

Again, Garret continued his thought, "Sure, take your time. Anyway, that place is a goldmine. We weren't getting anywhere 'til I had the idea of looking through all that scrap he keeps lying around in there. As it is, I still had to write the software to get all these different systems to talk to each other from scratch, let alone the dish relays themselves-"

"-Ahah! Got it, got it, there ya go."

"Uh, well, that's a Robertson screwdriver. Have a look in the fourth drawer down-" it would either be there, in the drawer below, or in the first on top, depending on the day. "-so at first we were only trying to get a better radio signal in here, fit up a more reliable way of communicating with the bigger towns we trade with, that kinda thing."

"How about this?"

It took Garret all of his mental strength not to stare at him for too long. "Yeah, no…closer, though, kind of. That's..a hammer."

He went back to plaiting wires. "And signal's always been kind of patchy around here. There's just a lot of natural interference for some reason, so you need a good strong transmitter to start with. But then I got thinking, since the Ottens don't mind this thing in their field, why not go for something a little more ambitious?"

Frayed, bright eyes looked up at him with weak hope. "This?"

Garret sighed inwardly. "That'd be my sandwich."

He took it from Wheatley, gently, argued with himself, gave up, and responded, "I guess it is time for a break. I'll come on down."

The sandwich, like most food, went straight to his mouth. He unclipped himself from the wires and slid down the iron jungle without a single hitch. He tore a piece of the sandwich off and noticed something else about Wheatley from his new perspective.

Mart was right. The man was positively, ridiculously _tall_ , even with his slouching posture. He was a good six feet at the _least_ , making Garret come up to barely about his shoulders. He had to crane his neck up just to look at his face. An unpleasant position, but he would manage.

The tall man currently looked even _more_ frantic, if that were possible. His hands were knotting overtime over each other.

"So-er, just to clarify," he said, trying to change the subject, "what does it- _she_ , sorry- what does she actually _do_?"

Garret caught that change- another odd thing- most people didn't consider his way of addressing _her_. He looked longingly up-and-down his creation, and decided to answer a question he was often asked. Romy jokingly always called The Speech.

He started," When she's fired up, she's gonna act as a base station, getting us signal clear across the tri-state area, maybe even further. We'll get wireless digital signal processing and data transmission as high as two g-bits per second. We'll have long-distance capability that'll put the vorts to shame. Radio, of course, and phone, internet, all the public news broadcasts, independent channels- you name it. No more shifting around trying to get a good signal halfway across town- if it all works out, we'll be able to send and receive _anything_ as well as those hotshots over in New Detroit. Maybe even _better."_

He was beaming by the end of it- proud of where he had come- and determined to show where he was going to go. Three years may have seemed like a long time, but it was nothing compared to the good she was going to bring this town in the long run.

Speaking of which, he had to record today's findings. His aide was taken out of his pocket, mouth full of the remains of his sandwich, and his fingers were already flying across the virtual keypad.

There might have been someone speaking, but he had already shifted focus to his work.

A voice replied, "I'll just leave you to it, then. "Can see you two need some, er, alone time. Keep up the good work."

"Nice meeting you," Garret managed to speak around his lunch in his mouth, "Come back and help some time, we always need more hands."

"Right!"

Garret looked out of the corner of his eye as Wheatley retreated by walking backwards. He saw a familiar silhouette of a lady around the barn. He only got to see half of her, but he sighed in relief to see that Wheatley hadn't been lying about Chell being alright.

Her dark hair was pulled up in a ponytail, as usual. A slip of white under her shirt, probably bandaging to seal the wound. She almost dwarfed by her companion, even with her rigid posture.

It was a peculiar sight. A bent wittering stalk in a crooked upside-down J position next to a warm, stone pillar daring all around her to even try to question her presence. In any other context, you wouldn't see two people of these descriptions even a boulder's throw within each other. But, Garret saw familiarity in Chell's body language, a gentle patience in her stance, a wry glint in her gaze. It was obvious these two had a history.

This was the first time he had even considered Chell had a _past_. She was a woman of the _now,_ the present, the what-needed-to-be-done. Get the task done, tick it off the list, bring on the next. Always driven ever forward by some unseen force that was as constant as gravity drove meteors in the atmosphere, debris into planets, and stars into black holes. There was no reason, no logical explanation, just a simple fact. She _kept going_ , never looking back.

Wheatley, or at least his first impression of the guy, was….not.

This guy was all over the place. His speech was constantly trying to get in a word in edgewise over itself in a heated debate that only it understood. Sometimes it seemed like he would get stuck on one idea and incessantly repeat it in any possible combination of ways to get the idea across.

He wondered how they knew each other.

The engineer's curiosity could wait. Garret had a task list to finish and lost time to make up for. This had been an interesting distraction, but that was all-a distraction. Fox had been waiting on him long enough.

The gears of his head switched into a state of relaxed focus, hungry for action but controlled and uniform to the teeth. He wolfed down the rest of his sandwich, clipped himself back into the cables, and climbed to his previous workplace with the newly bundled wires.

He kept his attention on his work, but the automatic pace of finishing the panel's weld allowed a sliver of attention to diverge. Garret ignored it, but he still felt the as-not-yet acknowledged feeling of uncertainty itching the crook of the back of his neck, hairs starting to rise. If he had consciously acknowledged it, he would have recognized the symptom's similarity to eerie shadows of an empty house.


End file.
